Some of the most stylish laptops ever designed
Alexandra | 12:47 am | December 23, 2009 | Laptop Mods
For a laptop, design is not less important than its hardware insides, as any industrial designer will testify. People are ready to pay high premium for so-called “high-tech beauties”. That is why stylish and unusual laptops can be sold much faster than “standard” ones. Moreover, designers add some new features even in budget laptop models in a bid to attract additional buyers.
For example, Acer maintains this trend in such popular model like Ferrari, Fujitsu implements it in LifeBook, Toshiba surprises us with Qosmio, etc.
The first thing that manufacturers use in such laptops is an unusual laptop body and well-chosen color combinations. They try to crack the access code into customers’ hearts, finding courageous colors, hues and nuances. They also try to replace standard plastic laptop bodies with titanium ones or use special mixtures to give them more shine and protect from mechanical damage. So, those who want to buy a stylish notebook and express their individuality always can find something special.
The world’s leading portable PC manufacturers experiment with new materials (processed plastic, precious wood, stones and metals). People want to stand out from the crowd, be different from each other and it plays into the hands of many companies. For example, one of the Arab sheikhs ordered a laptop with inlays from ivory. Just imagine how much it cost him!
Laptops have become a part of our everyday live; it’s not a surprise to anyone. But you can impress others, putting a high-tech gadget in an unusual body. So, let’s feast our eyes upon other stylish laptops:
A gorgeous case for amazing Sony Vaio P laptop
You can buy stylish leather case for Sony Vaio P choosing one of 30 different colors.
Lenovo Pocket Yoga. It’s an awesome laptop, but unfortunately it’s just a concept
Laptop market trends: forecasts for 2010
Alexandra | 7:27 pm | December 14, 2009 | Laptop News
What do we like in modern laptops? What do we want to improve in them? So, let’s discuss laptop market trends for the year 2010. Reading the text below, you will see how new technologies can make your live better. 
Netbooks will continue its triumphal procession in 2010. These devices are positioned as complements of full-featured
notebooks, not as their substitutes. More than 5 million netbooks were sold in 2008, and experts think that sales will be estimated as 50 million in 2012! So, netbooks remains very attractive, easy and inexpensive gadgets for cheap and fast Internet connection.
It’s a remarkable fact that development of new laptop models will reduce growth of sales (now it’s 26% per year). By the way, stunted growth of desktop computers sales has already transformed into drop in sales in some European countries.
17-inch monitors will be replaced by 18″-20″ LED-backlit displays, because their price is gradually approaching the prices of conventional monitors.
External hard drives will be more and more popular, because new programs and games require more and more gigabytes.
There is no doubt that almost every notebook will be equipped with blu-ray-drive in the near future, it will happen closer to the end of 2010.
But forecasts for solid state drives are not so clear. They are faster, easier, but some expert believes that as buyers can buy a classic hard drive of bigger size at the same price, they prefer larger storage volume, rather than better technology of SSD. But, of course, leading specialists have no doubts that future is with this technology.
Laptop battery life extension can be considered as one of the most important target for manufacturers in 2010. Some of them have encouraging results. Hardware developers are working in two directions: on the one hand they try to reduce power consumption of laptops with conventional batteries and on the other hand they create new types of laptop batteries.
As for the first direction, designers plan “to teach” laptops turn off unused components. For example, laptop uses integrated graphics core working with simple office applications and turns on a discrete graphics card running 3D-games.
As for the second direction here we should tell about fuel cells and new promising lithium-polymer batteries, which allow to create slim laptops. Also OLED-displays and new HDD Seagate Momentus Thin will make laptops even more slimmer.
Stolen and lost laptops in the UK: do you want to be the next victim?
Alexandra | 9:53 pm | December 7, 2009 | Security
Every week thousands of people lose their laptops. According to the last study conducted by Dell, business travellers lose more than 15,500 laptops per week (in the EU). A researcher has found that London Heathrow has the highest number of missing or stolen laptops (900 gadgets a week).
Unfortunately, most of people in the United Kingdom don’t undertake any measures to ensure security of their personal information which they keep on their mobile computers. Lost or stolen laptop means not only loss of your device but also moral damage and loss of valuable information (not only your private letters and photos, collections of favourite videos and music). For most of businesspeople loss of information takes the form of unrecovered damages, loss of money and reputation. But nevertheless Dell statistic shows that the British don’t realize consequences of their carelessness:
- “My data is not backed up” – that was the answer of 43% of respondents in the UK.
- “I do not take steps to protect my confidential information” – 59%.
- “Sometimes I left my laptop under the supervision of my fellow passenger” – 42%.
- “I employ disk encryption” – only 12%.
- “I use biometric methods to secure my laptops” – only 6% (while fingerprint scanner systems prevent unauthorised access to Toshiba, IBM, Lenovo, ASUS and many other laptops).
There are lots of gadgets and software products that can help you reduce negative consequences of the loss of data. Firefound (add-on for Firefox and Fennec) is one such solution. It cleans your personal data in just a few simple clicks and enables you to find your stolen computer.
Firefound uses geolocation to determine your current position and sends this information to your laptop (using it like an internet server). If your mobile computer is lost then you can get into the web interface of Fifefound and get to know where your laptop is and remove all your personal data.
You can also configure levels of safety in such a way that you will receive a letter if your laptop is used more than a certain number of miles away from your location. Or Firefound will remove your personal information if criminal is not able to enter the correct password with the X number of attempts.
But remember that it’s much easier to prevent such problems than to fight them, by keeping your laptop from getting lost or stolen.
