The latest laptop news from around the web for May 1st:
- Norway tests laptop exam scheme – BBC News – About 6,000 students in Norway are doing exams on their laptops in a trial that could soon be rolled out across the country. Every 16-19 year-old in Nord-Trondelag county in Norway has been trying out the laptop-based system. The secondary students …
- Netbook growth seen slowing when economy recovers (EETimes.fr) – Netbook shipments grew by more than 2,000 percent last year and are expected to grow another 68.5 percent in 2009, but this explosive growth is likely to slow as the economy rebounds beginning in 2010, an analyst said.
- Lenovo’s 15-inch IdeaPad Y550 laptop with Desktop Navigator now on sale (Engadget) – Is that, is that a laptop? Why yes, yes it is… that’s Lenovo’s IdeaPad Y550 now ready for purchase. In a world gone cuckoo for Atom-based netbooks, isn’t it refreshing to see a 15.6-inch (1366 x 768 pixel) laptop that packs a 2GHz Core 2 Duo T4200 processor, 2GB of DDR3 memory and 250GB hard disk, 6-cell battery, integrated DVD writer, and touch-sensitive Desktop Navigator shortcut bar for …
- New Laptop Hunters Ad: Sheila Spends Two Grand On Another HP (TechCrunch) – HP wins again with the latest Laptop Hunters episode. Is it just me, or are they doing some really creative editing with the dialogue? It’s like NPR interview editing on steroids. As for her choice, I personally would go with a Mac at that price (not so much at $1000 or $1500), or at least go with a more interesting PC. It’s widescreen and it has a good processor and video card? Okay, that’s …
- Near-Perfect Laptop, Nifty Camcorder, Pretty Plasma – Wired – It’s not quite a netbook, not quite an ultralight PC. Whatever it is, Samsung’s NC20 is a dazzling feat of engineering: an extremely usable 12-inch laptop with epic battery life, impressive specs and a downright mystifyingly affordable price tag. But …
- Are Netbook’s Fortune Tied to the Economy? (InternetNews.com) - iSuppli says Netbook sales will slow when the economy improves and people have more money to spend.
- ZDNet: Netbook market? What netbook market? (Linux Today) - Khaotic Musings: “And yet, even in this market, now reshaped to favour Microsoft’s monopoly machinery, Linux still snared 24% of ‘netbook’ shipments.”
- Dell’s New Adamo Laptop (BusinessWeek) – Dell’s ( DELL ) new Adamo laptop is by far the best-looking product ever to come out of Round Rock, Tex. Before you complain that Dell’s ultra-utilitarian approach to design has set the bar pretty low, I’ll add that the Adamo is a good-looking machine by any standard.
- HP unveils ProBook laptop line – Saudi Gazette - Hewlett-Packard Co, the world’s top PC maker, is launching a new line of inexpensive business laptops with fresh features targeting users at small and medium-size companies. The HP ProBook s-series, which starts shipping globally on Tuesday, is the …
- FastMac U-Charge laptop battery charger – Mac Central – Many road warriors carry a spare laptop battery with them so they can extend their work time away from a power source (assuming their laptop uses a removable battery, of course; two of Apple’s recent models do not). But while multiple batteries are …
- Fujitsu gets official with M2010 netbook, Engadget Chinese goes hands-on (Engadget) – We already caught sight of Fujitsu’s new 10.1-inch LOOX M netbook in Japan earlier this month, and it looks like the company has now gotten official with the seemingly identical M2010 model for some other markets, although it still hasn’t made it all the way over here. The netbook itself is about as standard as can be, and includes a 1.6GHz Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, and …
- Will Netbook Boom End When Economy Recovers? (Cellular-News.com) – As consumers’ disposable incomes dwindle, they are flocking to buy low-cost netbook PCs, driving global shipments up by 68.5 percent in 2009 and by a whopping 2,424 percent in 2008, according to iSuppli.
- 24 Open Source Apps for the ASUS Netbook (IT Management) - Eighteen short months ago, Taiwanese manufacturer Asus debuted the Eee, the netbook that launched the latest craze for small, lightweight, inexpensive laptops. When the original 350,000 units – all equipped with Linux – sold out in just a few months, the open source community rejoiced.
