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• Round Up: Five Powerful, Light Ultraportables

  Ed: This piece first ran on our sister site—Tom’s Guide—a week ago. We don’t do much mainstream notebook coverage on Tom’s Hardware—we focus on the mobile gaming hardware instead. However, because these are ultraportables, we thought they’d warrant a look here on the hardware side of things. If you read this story on Tom’s Guide last week, hopefully this note saves you a few minutes (check out our first Holiday Buyer’s Guide of the year instead). If you missed it, though, we hope you enjoy it now. Take it away, Rachel. Consider The Ultraportable PC manufacturers and industry analysts can’t stop talking about netbooks, those itty-bitty machines designed for nothing more than a bit of Web browsing. Netbooks may be selling like hotcakes—they are quite cheap, after all—but they’re not ideal for those who want to see connectivity, power and productivity from a thin and light notebook. Take a netbook on a business trip, and it wouldn’t be able to hold all of your mission-critical applications and downtime entertainment. But what if you could have a featherweight machine that housed most of the innards you’d find in a 15-inch notebook? And how much would you pay for the privilege? Enter the ultraportable, a relatively new PC category taking the business and consumer markets by storm (though in the current economy, ultraportable manufacturers can’t take IT budgets for granted). Ultraportables are expensive; the five we gathered in our offices range in price from $1,699 to $2,999. But before you get sticker shock, keep in mind that to qualify as an ultraportable—at least the Tom’s Guide’s definition of one—a computer must meet several criteria. It must weigh under 3 pounds, have a screen 12.1 inches in size or smaller, be about an inch thick, and contain several advanced add-ons or possess a luxury design. And odds are that an ultraportable will also feature an extremely low-powered and energy efficient Intel Core 2 Duo processor, a built-in optical drive, an LED backlit screen*, perhaps a solid state drive, and most likely an install of Windows Vista Business. Most ultraportables have style, as well as the components to compete performance-wise with, say, a low-end 15-inch Dell. With ultraportables, there are sacrifices to be made for the sake of weight and size, though. An ultraportable is nobody’s sole PC—typically it is a third computer, but in some cases, a second. Typically, ultraportables are marketed as business laptops. Executives and employees constantly on the road may request them from their IT departments, or entrepreneurs may want tiny machines to show off to potential clients. Because of their appeal to this niche, ultraportables are often equipped with security-focused features like fingerprint scanners, and are designed to look deluxe, sophisticated and somewhat conservative. They are often sold with the option for a docking station so road warriors can come home to roost comfortably. They may have the option for extended warranties and specialized damage repair options. And most of them do come with Windows Vista Business already on the machine, to cater to this crowd. Ultraportables are also designed with consumers in mind. Some manufacturers are putting their little machines on sale in time for the holiday season, and sexy designs are catching the eyes of just about anyone who’d also consider the MacBook Air or any other popular 13.3” notebook. In this roundup, we’ve include the nearly weightless Toshiba R500, the leather-clad Asus U2E, the expressive Lenovo IdeaPad U110, the staid Fujitsu P8010, and the ultra high-end Sony Vaio TX (which Sony is currently phasing out in order to introduce the new Vaio TT that we will be reviewing soon). In addition to testing the battery life and benchmarking performance of these machines, I also tried to travel and live with these machines; in fact, I wrote each computer’s review on that machine. We’ve considered three other factors when scoring the machines, besides battery life and performance: style, usability and price. Each computer received a score out of five points in each of the five categories; you’ll find the category score at the end of each category section. In many ways, these five machines represent the early days of the ultraportable category. As manufacturers work out design kinks and components become ever smaller and stronger, we’ll soon—by necessity—determine entirely new definitions for the categories and methods for evaluating them. Testing Battery Life and Performance We tested battery life using the open source benchmark BatteryEater Pro v2.70. To test performance, we used Microsoft Windows Vista’s Windows Experience Index and FutureMark’s PCMark Vantage v1.00, with the November 2007 Hotfix. You can see the details of these tests on the Testing pages toward the end of this article. The Testing pages also present our methodology for the tests and for calculating summary scores (ranging from 1 to 5) for battery life and performance for each notebook. The summary scores are included in the discussion of each notebook immediately following. To better understand why our tests turned out as they did, be sure to check out the Ultraportable Specifications page, which provides a comprehensive list of components in each of the five notebooks we tested. *In the pages below, you will see pictures of ultraportable displays. Bear in mind that these photos are only relative representations of the screen’s true picture quality; we have not tested these displays for luminance or contrast levels.

• Nvidia's Ion: Lending Atom Some Wings

  Nvidia’s GeForce 9400 launch garnered the company a lot of publicity. After all, the chipset provided exactly what the market had been waiting for: It’s compatible with Intel processors; with all due respect to AMD fans, up until Phenom II launched, these offered the best performance and lowest power consumption. It’s built around modern graphics circuitry that’s as powerful as an entry-level GeForce add-in, and can decode HD video. It does all of this with relatively low power consumption and a small footprint. The GeForce 9400, and its mobile version, the 9400M, offer a lot more than Intel’s mobile chipsets. That’s particularly true in the area of graphics performance, be it for entry-level desktop PCs, multi-use computers, “home cinema” boxes, or laptops/notebooks. Apple, by the way, made its position clear, going so far as to totally abandon Intel’s integrated chipsets in its MacBook line of notebooks. But beyond standard desktops and notebooks, Nvidia is aiming at the netbook and nettop market—a lucrative one in tight economic times like these. To go after that market, Nvidia developed its Ion platform. Unveiled a few weeks ago, the Ion reference platform consists of a case containing a pico-ITX motherboard with an Nvidia 9400M chipset and the de rigueur Intel Atom processor.  Does Atom + 9400M add up to the best compromise between sufficient performance, flexibility, and lower energy consumption? Is the classic Intel platform really outmoded? To find out, we tested the very first Ion platform we could get our hands on, and compared it to the first Intel Atom board: the D945GCLF.

• Toshiba and SSDs Competing in a market that’s been targeted by the world’s largest semiconductor company is no easy task. Given Intel’s push into the SSD (solid state storage) market, Toshiba has tried to differentiate itself from Intel’s more commodity-like approach. For example, Toshiba offers a half-terabyte SSD, while Intel’s current largest SSD is 160GB. Now Toshiba is pushing into alternative form factors, such as a mSATA (mini-SATA) configuration in 30GB and 62GB sizes, suitable for netbooks or server boot drives. These drives plug directly into a mini-PCI interface and are substantially smaller (up to 1/7th the size of a 2.5-inch form factor). Toshiba will also be offering similar configurations in a “half-slim” form factor, smaller than a business card, with no actual case, that plugs directly into a SATA port. USB 3.0 Update We mentioned USB 3.0 (also known as “SuperSpeed USB”) in our day two IDF update. We’re updating that brief mention today with an update after a technical session on USB 3.0’s steady march towards actual products. Up to 10x performance increase--480 Mb/s to 5 Gb/sFast Sync-N-Go to minimize user wait timeOptimize power efficiency--uses 1/3 the power of USB 2.0; no device polling and lower active and idle power requirementsBackward compatible with USB 2.0. NEC announced the first SuperSpeed USB host controller, the uDP 720200. Asus had a PCI Express interface card based on the NEC chip, running in several PCs, connected to various peripherals. Asus is also showing its previously-announced P6X58 Premium motherboard with the NEC controller built directly onto the motherboard. The system was connected to a solid state drive streaming data off at 250MB/sec, around eight times faster than similar USB 2.0 products. Fujitsu demoed a laptop PC with the NEC host controller, too. Given Intel’s public roadmaps, it may be a good year before we see SuperSpeed USB embedded into PC core logic. Then there’s the issue of software support. At the USB 3.0 technical session, senior program manager Lars Guisti of Microsoft gave an update on how SuperSpeed USB’s XHCI driver stack might be implemented into Windows. It’s a fairly complex driver stack, given support for backward compatibility, the new power management features, and higher data speeds. Microsoft will be delivering native support for XHCI in some future Windows update, but the timing is uncertain.