It's been a full year since Lenovo announced it had signed up Ashton Kutcher as a "product engineer," and Lenovo is apparently happy with the partnership. The actor/investor is to appear via satellite at a Lenovo event in London on Thursday to introduce several new products, including the new Yoga 3 Pro and ThinkPad Yoga 14 notebooks.
Like it or not, the 2-in-1 design that pairs a laptop with a detachable touchscreen that can double as a tablet seems here to stay. Acer showed several new models at the IFA tradeshow in Germany on Wednesday, and HP unveiled three of its own on Thursday, along with two new Chromebooks.
Based on the way most laptops sound, I'd venture a guess that audio is the last thing engineers think about when they design laptops. In fact, I'd go one step further to speculate that marketing efforts drive most laptop builders' decisions to collaborate with audio companies. But I won't lump Samsung's 2014 ATIV Book 9 in that crowd, because it sounds absolutely divine--especially with headphones.
Asus announced a slew of PC gaming-oriented products at Computex on Tuesday. The new additions to the company's Republic of Gamers (ROG) lineup include two desktop PCs, a laptop, three motherboards, a video card, and a new display. The early info we received is a little thin, but here's what we know.
Toshiba announced a number of late additions to its 2014 back-to-school lineup today, including low-priced 8- and 10-inch tablets that run the recently announced Windows 8.1 with Bing. The company also announced an even-less-expensive 7-inch Android tablet.
Poor Lenovo. HP co-opted its contortionist laptop design in February with the Pavilion x360, and now Toshiba is introducing a Yoga copycat. The Satellite Radius is a 15.6-inch convertible with a 360-degree hinge that offers five usage modes: Laptop, tablet, presentation, audience, and tabletop.
Toshiba's Satellite P50t boasts two important firsts: It's the first laptop to feature a 4K display, and it's the first to be Technicolor Color Certified. You likely have at least a passing familiarity with 4K video, but I would argue that the latter claim to fame--which you might never have heard of--deserves more praise.
I'm not completely sold on the 2-in-1 hybrid concept. A laptop that becomes a tablet when detached from its keyboard? Who really needs that? But if you're smitten by the idea, Toshiba's Portege Z10t is the best execution I've seen. It's not too big, it's not too heavy, and it packs some serious computational horsepower.
A decade after entering the field, Sonos leads the multi-room audio market, thanks in large measure to software controllers that make its hardware exceedingly easy for consumers to install and operate. Now the company is preparing to ship its first from-the-ground-up redesign of those controllers. Most Sonos users will be happy with the changes.
Lenovo is returning to the home storage market for the first time since it launched its IdeaCentre D400 back in 2009. The Lenovo Beacon Home Cloud Center is a two-drive NAS (network-attached storage) device that can be accessed locally or via the Internet.
It seems like a bit of a disconnect for HP to announce new commercial PCs at a trade show focused on consumer electronics, but HP--which didn't book exhibit space at this year's CES--is wise not to waste the opportunity.
If you've been keeping abreast of the Windows tablet market, Acer's Iconia W4 will sound very familiar.
Teams of expert overclockers use liquid nitrogen to push gaming rigs to the limit, setting all-new benchmark records.
HP's Pavilion TouchSmart 11z-e000 is one the smallest, lightest, and least expensive notebooks we've ever reviewed. It's also one of the slowest, finishing dead last on nearly every criterion in our five-system roundup except two important ones: weight and battery life.
The buyers that Toshiba targets with its luxury Kirabook wouldn't touch a Satellite L55Dt-A5253 if Neiman Marcus was giving them away. That's too bad, because this laptop actually offers a much better price-to-performance ratio.
