HP is trying its hand at innovating the laptop industry. While most of its competitors go for portability and style, the HDX Pavilion is a true dragon of the genre. It's not ashamed to weigh 15.5 pounds and be 2.3-inches thick. It has all the heavyweight specs to back it up.

The Pavilion runs with a 2.4Ghz Core Duo Centrino, two 200GB SATA hard drives, 4GB of RAM, a 256MB Radeon Mobility graphics card, a HD-DVD Drive, Bluetooth connectivity and a 20.1 inch monitor just to give you a hint of what this baby is made of. HP touts it as a total entertainment laptop.

Unfortunately, it also has a hefty price point. Unless you own oil fields or something, this will devastate your finances. Be content with your home theatre if you're not raking in the dough by the truckloads.

  

If you're into Monster Hunter Online and you're in the market for a new laptop, you may want to check out the May 2007 releases from Toshiba. The Qosmio G40 series and the Dynabook TX series are both recommended by the game developers to run the game as smoothly as possible even while you're on the move.

The TX series packs a base processor of Core Duo 2 strength running at 1.66Ghz. It also has 1GB of memory and a large hard drive to get all those files in. The G40 series carry similar core specs, but the units in its wing have something that a lot of notebooks don't: an HD-DVD-R drive to play and burn high capacity and high definition content.

Both models are still available in Japan, but are slated for a later release date in North America later this year. Pricing is still "open" as the Japanese market terms it. We'll keep you posted for more.

Talk about going all out. Sony has not only decided to give every owner the Blu-ray treatment: it's doing that with its laptops, too. The new Sony VAIO L type has that new-fangled Blu-ray drive so you can watch "Casino Royale" and a lot more to show off.

 

The 19-inch frame has all the oomph necessary to give users all the media and computing joys possible. It's loaded with a Core Duo 2 processor running at a top speed of 2.16Ghz and 1GB RAM. The graphics are handled by a trusty Nvidia GeForce 7600, and there's even a TV tuner and DVD writer to burn whatever masterpiece of television magic happen to have.

The price point is a little high at US$ 3, 353, but with all the wonderful stuff that they packed in, who's to whine? Windows Vista will surely run well with specs this hot. It's costly, but still a worthy buy.

Motherboard manufacturers in Taiwan have an aggressive increase in orders for high-capacitance multi-layer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs) used in the manufacturing of CPUs allegedly for the use in an AMD-based Apple notebook. With Intel getting in on the Apple action, there's no reason why the other major CPU manufacturer in the world shouldn't get a piece of the warm Apple pie. AMD Taiwan have refused to comment on this.

Although some are saying that an AMD Apple notebook is in the works, other motherboard manufacturers have claimed that there are no AMD/Apple notebooks around, firstly due to Intel having processor superiority over AMD with its latest Core Duo 2 line-up, and that AMD has insufficient capacity to manufacture chips for Apple notebooks.

This is a nice area to look at, and with the success of Boot Camp and the integration Intel processors, and if AMD processor integration goes ahead, Apple computers may steal a lot more of the notebook market, taking even more people away from their Windows laptop loyalties.

Gone are the days of donning your favorite football team's logo on your shirts, now you can have them on your laptops!

Fujitsu has come out with their Football Laptops, otherwise dubbed as the "award-winning" AMILO Pi 1536 series with lacquered finishes that feature the Everton, Celtic, Aston Villa and Tottenham Hotspur teams.

The laptop sports a 15.4-inch WXGA display screen, has Intel Core Duo T2400 CPU, 1GB RAM, and a massive 120GB hard drive where you can store images of your favorite football players and of course, game footages.

You can get these laptops from Fujitsu's website for roughly $1,900 or £1,000, and show your friends who's the real football fanatic!

This has been a bad year for some electronics manufacturers. There have been several reports of laptops that simply explode and burst into flame, and at least one company had to recall a portable DVD player when it was reported to have blown up.

The problem lies in the fact that we continually demand more and more of these machines. Applications demand more RAM and more processing power, which in turn require more and more energy.

Recently, chipmaker Intel has begun to address the required "energy per instruction", or EPI. The goal is to create chips that are not only powerful, but energy efficient as well. A more efficient chip can make for a lighter computer that runs at cooler temperatures - reducing the chances of mishap.

For awhile the trend was disturbing. The original 1993 Pentium required 13 nanojoules per instruction. Ten years later, a Pentium 4 consumed four times that much energy. The trend seems to be reversing, however. The latest Pentium chip consumes no more than the original, but has three times the processing power. The Core Duo processors consume only 10 nanojoules per instruction, yet their processing power is comparable to the Pentium 4.

The trend looks promising. The original Pentium chips in 1993 consumed 13 nanojoules per instruction. But the Pentium 4s from a couple of years ago consumed a whopping 49 nanojoules per instruction.

"There is a little good in all evil." My grandmother said that once. If any good has come from the recent spate of laptop and DVD player explosions, it's that the need for greater energy efficiency in computer chips has become apparent - and that the issue is finally getting the attention it deserves.

Intel officially completes its comeback special leg this Monday. According to insiders, the world's largest semi-conductor company plans to launch finally the notebook version of Core 2 or what was formerly known as Merom. Notebook makers are expected to endorse new systems based on this said chip.

Intel's performance figures dramatically improved because of other Core architecture chips that are slower and more efficient. Older laptops that are now slowly being replaced encounter slow processor and overheating problems. Eventually, Intel envisions to have Merom supersede all Core Duo, the first dual-core notebook chip.

Core Duo 2 chips plug anyway into the same motherboards these prior chips use. More is expected of Intel as it announces more substantial renovation to its notebook products in March 2007.

Many decades ago, no one would have bought a "jive" anything. For those of you below 80, "jive" means the same as today's "b.s." But times have changed since then. Who knew Korea would be a major electronics powerhouse? Korea's Haseenote is proud to present its Jive W205R.  The notebook has a 12 inch (1280×800) display screen, a 1.66 Ghz Core Duo T2050, 1GB RAM, 80GB SATA, DVD Multi burner, and 64MB ATI Radeon Xpress 200M. It's achiles' heel is its video card which, according to reports, is not the most powerful. But if that (and the word "Jive") isn't an issue with you, you can get the Jive notebook for around $1, 070.

Perhaps a 17-inch widescreen laptop is nothing special nowadays, but a 17-inch widescreen laptop that goes for less than $1,100 bucks is.

For just over $1,000 ($1,036 to be exact), you could be the proud and happy owner of the Sotec WinBook DN8000. This contraption brought by the said Japanese company, packs a heavy punch. Inside it is an Intel Celeron M 420 (1.60-GHz) or a 2.16-GHz Core Duo T2600 (optional) CPU, 512 MB of RAM, and 40 GB HDD.

This laptop also has four built-in speakers, a 17-inch WXGA+ display, and a DVD Super Multi Drive. Aside from that, you'll also find four USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, and a 3-in-1 memory card reader. This thingamajig measures 394 x 287 x 39mm and weighs 8.2-pounds which is not exactly lightweight. It will start to be available in Japan this coming July 14, whereas it's availability outside the Land of the Rising Sun is yet to be divulged.

When the infamous MacBook Pro was released to the masses back at the start of the year, it was housed in a very fetching aluminium case, gained somewhat from its predecessor. When the MacBook was released recently, that too supported a 'newish' case, which gained popularity thanks to its slimline appearance, and its choice of white and black. We have now learned that the new release of the PowerMac will be housed within a newly designed case.

The new case will be different enough to allow instant distinction between the PowerPC and Intel Core Duo variants. Together with the cases, there will be a few choices on which processors to adopt. The new Intel Core Duo will be available for the PowerMac with 2 chips, A.K.A. Quad-core platform. It is not known whether the PowerMac will adopt the soon-to-be released Core Duo 2 chip, codenamed Conroe. The mobile variant is not expected till Fall.

The MacBook Pro will also have a new case for its range. However rumour has it that this will not be released till the system adopts the Intel Core Duo 2 chip, codenamed Merom. We would hope that issues are fixed in the new case release including heat expulsion.