Dell adds Inspiron 17 laptop - Gadget World

Good news, lovers of giant laptops: Dell's just added a 17.3-inch option to its Inspiron lineup. The Inspiron 17 -- which has a backlit 16:9 aspect ratio, 1,600 x 900 resolution LCD -- will boast options for Intel Pentium Dual Core as well as Core 2 Duo processors, up to 3GB of RAM, an up to 320GB SATA hard drive, and an up to 9-cell battery (the base model comes with a 4-cell). Other optionals include a Blu-ray drive and a 1080p display. You can order this puppy now -- the base price is a pretty sweet $499 -- and it should ship sometime in August. One more shot after the break.

Lenovo U350 Is Pretty Thin, Pretty Light, and Pretty Cheap - Gadget World

Just last week Intel was all "Hey! Thin, light and cheap laptops are the next big thing, TRUST US!" The Lenovo IdeaPad U350, a $650, 13.3-inch ultrathin notebook, is exactly what they were talking about.

Intel and Lenovo's concept makes enough sense: take those ultrathing, ultra-expensive notebooks like the MacBook Air, Dell Adamo or VooDoo Envy and sacrifice a little performance, a little weight and a little thinness to bring the price down. After all, they're already sluggish, so why not? What makes it genius, though, is how this compromise manifests itself. It turns out, these mild design and performances compromises knock a tremendous sum off the price.

The U350 is a sub-1-inch-thick, 3.5lb 13.3-inch notebook which, aside from its thin profile and conspicuous lack of an optical drive, is a fairly standard piece of notebook hardware. You can get just about anything you want in one of these guys—Core 2 Solo, Pentium ULV or Celeron processors; up to 8GB of RAM and up to 500GB of storage—but after a while you'll start to lose the price advantage that makes it attractive in the first place. It'll be around that $700-$800 pricepoint that the U350 shines. Available from July, full press release and spec sheet below

Lenovo S12 Is the First Netbook With Nvidia Ion, Costs Under $500 - Gadget World

With the IdeaPad S12, Lenovo, as rumored, is first out of the gates with a netbook based on Nvidia's Ion chipset, and it's a hell of a promising start: this 12-inch netbook promises the whole HD-playing, game-conquering Ion experience for around $500.

First, a refresher: Nividia's Ion platform is essentially Intel's Atom processor combined with the decent Nvidia 9400m graphics unit. The resulting performance isn't independently mind-blowing, offering smooth 1080p video decoding, including accelerated h.264 playback, Blu-ray playback and moderate gaming capabilities, but put into the context of existing Atom netbooks, it's a revelation.

Though technically not the first Ion-based product—that honor goes to the Acer Revo nettop—this is the first netbook, and frankly, it's exactly what we were told to expect from the start: a midrange, 12-inch netbook with a multimedia bent. It's a followup to the company's existing S9 and S10 IdeaPads, and, excluding the ION—a $50 option, unfortunately—it's not that different from its smaller stablemates.

The screen resolution is higher, at 1280x800, but therein lies a slight problem. Ion's banner claims revolve around HD video playback, and 1080p video won't be viewable on the S12, except on an external screen through its HDMI output. That said, the difference between 720p and 1080p video on such a small would hardly be noticeable.