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ACi or Allied Computers International, a
laptop specialist brand from the UK, has launched a super-affordable
“laptop” in India – the ACi Icon 1100, which will be retailed for as
little as Rs. 4,999.
With its specifications and feature set however, the device qualifies as an affordable netbook. Featuring a 10.2-inch 1024x768 pixel display, the ACi Icon 1100 runs on an undisclosed VIA CPU, along with 512MB of RAM (1GB optional). Dimensions are 11 x 7.25 x 1 inches, and it weighs in at 0.7kgs.
Other specifications include a MMC/SD
push card reader, 10/100 Ethernet adapter, Wi-Fi, 3G support via USB
dongle, 3 USB 2.0 ports, and 4GB of storage, expandable up to 32GB. It
will ship with 12 months replacement warranty.
The ACi Icon 1100 is sold in India by
the BSE listed company, Allied Computers International (Asia) Limited.
Speaking on the launch of the ACI Icon 1100, Mr. Hirji Patel, Managing
Director, ACi (Asia), said:
“Ergonomics and proper usability of a
Laptop by the today’s deprived segments is what we have focused on today
in our ACi ICON model. We will by no means stop here and will
continuously develop the models in months to come in order to meet
consumers' entire needs of today in order for them to up-bring their
families to one day own slick, stylish and power laptops of tomorrow’s
world.”
The company will also be launch other laptops from its portfolio in India, from mid-to-high end segments.
“At the same time as us fulfilling our
goal of developing India as a Laptop Nation with never ending price
breaks, we will continue to house latest technology in laptop computing
in all our laptop models to ensure India is never used as a dumping
ground by the MNCs of this world,”
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Dell has today launched a couple of new high powered laptop additions to its range, in the form of the Dell XPS 14 and XPS 15. Which are both equipped with Intel’s latest Ivy Bridge processors and can be fitted with solid state disks if desired. Watch the video after the jump to see it in action.
The Dell XPS laptops are available to purchase from $1099, with upgrade options offering Core i7 processors, supported by up to 8GB of RAM and storage provided by a 512GB SSD. XPS 15 has a starting price of $1299.
The difference between the XPS 14 and XPS 15 being the size of the screen 14 and 15 inch respectively with a 1600 x 900 (XPS 14) and 1920 x 1080 (XPS 15) resolution.
Other available options include a NVIDIA GeForce GT 630m graphics card with 1GB of video memory for the XPS 14 and NVIDIA GeForce GT 640m graphics card with 2GB of video memory on the larger XPS 15.
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Acer announced their new M5 range of ultrabooks back in May, and now they have announced that their new Acer M5 Ultrabooks will go on sale in the US later this month.
There are a few different models in the Acer M5 range, with a choice of either a 14 inch or a 15.6 inch display, the cheapest model is the Ultra M50-481T-6670, which features a core i3 sandy bridge processor and will retail for $679.99.
There are also a range of other models available with Intel’s latest Ivy Bridge processors, pricing on these models will start at $779.99 and for that you get an Intel Core i5 3317u Ivy Bridge processor, 4GB of RAM, discrete graphics and a 500GB HDD.
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Dell showed the heart of its 2012 laptop design language in the XPS 13 just as the snow started melting, but it's been mostly silent or conservative ever since. The company must want to close out the spring the same way it entered: Dell and Romania's Asesoft Distribution have just previewed a larger XPS 15 at an event B1 attended at the Bucharest-based Romanian Aviation Museum. Based on the early look, Dell isn't going to stretch the Ultrabook definition across the whole XPS range. There will still be full-power, 2.5GHz dual Core i5 and quad 2.1GHz Core i7 chips from Intel's Ivy Bridge family, and NVIDIA is supplying some modestly ultraportable GeForce GT 630M and 640M video. Although there's no special tricks that we can see so far, the 15.6-inch system is reportedly due to show in at least Romania by the end of the spring, which leaves just weeks to wait if you prefer your mid-size performance laptops designed in Texas.
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We recently got a look at Samsung's new Ivy Bridge-enhanced Series 5 laptops, but it turns out that's not the only refresh the line has gotten this month. Samsung's also now rather quietly introduced a pair of new AMD-based models on its website, including an $850 14-inch version with a quad-core A10-4655M APU, and a $700 13.3-inch model with a quad-core A6-4455M (both otherwise known as Trinityprocessors). You'll also get an AMD Radeon HD 7500G GPU on the 13.3-incher (while the 14 relies on integrated graphics), but their specs remain pretty much in line with their Intel-based counterparts beyond that, including a standard 4GB RAM on both models and 500GB or 750GB hard drives. You can find the full rundown on each at the links below.
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When Apple created major buzz around a new product in the past few years, it was almost always an iPhoneor iPad. That’s why it’s so refreshing to see the world ooh and aah about an Apple computer again, theMacBook Pro With Retina Display.
It certainly looks great on paper — a cutting-edge laptop loaded with the latest tech and a jaw-droppingly sharp screen. But does it really deliver the goods?
The answer isn’t just yes. It’s “oh, baby.” Within minutes of taking our review sample out of the box here at theMashable offices, a crowd of staffers gathered around to see what visions the glorious 2,880 x 1,800 retina display would show them.
It didn’t disappoint. After setting up the laptop and putting it side by side with a six-month-old MacBook Prowith the same-size screen, the difference was apparent to anyone with eyes.
Also apparent: How crazy thin this machine is — just 0.71 of an inch thick, or 0.03 inch thicker than the 13-inch MacBook Air. However, it’s a mite heftier at 4.46 pound to the Air’s roughly 3 pounds.
If you’re used to the Air or some of the sleeker Ultrabooks like the Dell XPS 13, the retina Pro’s is still a size class above. However, it’s still significantly less bulky than the regular Pro, and still fits in the same bags.
Feasting Your Retina
Back to that screen. Perhaps surprisingly, the first thing you notice is the deeper colors, not necessarily the sharpness — although that becomes clear when viewing photos with lots of detail. Browsing through the Flickr feed of the NASA Goddard Space Center, the crowd could see those extra pixels working to show, say, the wispy clouds in satellite shots of earth.
Virtually all images were displayed with more vibrant colors and better contrast than on the older Pro.
It’s not just photos that benefit from the extra pixels, but text and iconography as well. Everything from the system fonts to app icons to the galactic background image looks sharper, with better contrast.
After I connected the retina Pro to an external (non-retina) Acer monitor, it became something of a game to drag windows from one screen to the other, watching the images and text magically transform as they crossed from edge to edge, becoming crisper and more affecting.
When you venture outside Apple apps, however, the experience isn’t so improved. Sometimes it’s actually worse than what you had before. Text in third-party web browsers like Chrome and Firefox appears jagged and pixelated because those apps aren’t rendering for retina resolutions.
Although those app developers will issue updates that will address those issues (Google is already doing so with Chrome), it emphasizes how new this screen tech is. Eventually, ultra-high-resolution displays will become more common. But for now the retina MacBook is an outlier, and early adopters will pay the price in non-optimized apps, at least for a while.
There’s one way around that issue, of course: Just stick with Apple apps, which appear to be all retina-ready. iPhoto (see the screenshot below) and Aperture in particular take tremendous advantage of the screen, and if you can bear to browse the web with Safari (and judging by the browser stats for Mashable readers, you can’t), your eyes will be satisfied.
It actually got me surfing with Apple’s browser for more than 5 minutes for the first time in years.
It’s worth noting that by default, the retina display scales the screen so everything is the same size as it would be on a regular MacBook Pro. If you really enjoy squinting, though, you can use the streamlined display settings to make more use of your pixels. Everything will appear smaller, but you’ll get more on the screen, and the processor can handle it.
The Power of Pro
That processor, by the way, is an Intel third-generation (Ivy Bridge) quad-core Core i7, with a clock speed of either 2.3 or 2.6GHz (Turbo Boostable to 3.3 or 3.6GHz). It’s augmented by a discrete graphics processor, an Nvidia GeForce GT 650M with 1GB of dedicated memory (the laptop itself comes with 8GB, though you can configure it with 16GB at purchase).
That’s some serious power, but the retina Pro really needs it to drive all those pixels, particularly for graphics-intensive exercises, like video editing.
In addition to the meaty processing power, the new Pro has another performance advantage: a solid-state flash drive for storage. Since the drive doesn’t have moving parts like a hard disk has, the laptop can “lift” data off the drive faster, adding to the speed of the machine.
Just what can you do with that kind of power? We aimed to find out by re-creating a demo that Apple reps showed us: playing four simultaneous full HD video streams in Final Cut Pro X and making live cuts between them.
We made sure all the streams were all uncompressed 1080i files at 60 frames per second, cued them up, then watched for any stuttering or other problems. Check out the results in this video:
In our test, all the clips played just fine in the inspector window, never tripping up as we made rapid-fire cuts between them — an impressive feat. Apple says this is one of the abilities the solid-state drive bestows, and that the retina Pro is the only machine that can play four full-HD clips simultaneously.
The flash drive also speeds things up when copying files, but even better in that regard is the upgrade to USB 3.0. The retina MacBook Pro isn’t alone in getting better USB — all of Apple’s new laptops have it (native support for USB 3.0 comes hand-in-hand with Intel’s Ivy Bridge processors).
Still, it’s a welcome change, as is relocating one of the ports to the right side of the chassis, à la the MacBook Air.
Connectors & More
USB 3.0 and flash storage are a great combo, though its benefits will be best realized with USB 3.0 devices. When I tried offloading a big 3.84GB file from the most common thing users will likely use — a USB thumb drive — it took an 7 minutes, 3 seconds. That was better than the old MacBook Pro, which took almost 10 minutes, but not as awesome as you’d think.
Although the improved USB ports are on all MacBooks now, the retina Pro boasts a connector that isn’t: a full-size HDMI port. This is the first time an Apple laptop has included HDMI, and Apple says it’s because its customers demanded it.
It’s pretty obvious why — to watch video services like Netflix on a big-screen TV. Apple may have been reluctant to include HDMI until now to avoid subverting its own Apple TV box. Could the appearance of HDMI on the retina MacBook signal that Apple isn’t as concerned about that anymore, possibly because it has bigger plans for the living room?
We’ll leave that question unanswered for now, and instead say that the HDMI connection is welcome and worked well upon connection to one of the Sony TVs here at the Mashable offices.
Generally, you’ll probably want to mirror displays when connecting to a TV (see the pic below), though that will letterbox the screen on the pro to a 16:9 ratio while you’re connected.
Rounding out the jacks on the new Pro are an SDXC card slot (technically capable of reading cards up to 2TB, though cards have only gotten as big as 128GB) and two Thunderbolt ports — the fastest connector available on Apple gear. Those are where you’ll connect external monitors, drives and those adapters for Ethernet and FireWire, both of which do not appear on this machine.
The MacBook Transformed
Which leads to an important factor: You’ll definitely need some accessories to enjoy the fruits of a full-featured laptop. Besides those adapters, you’ll likely need an external optical drive for the few times you’ll want to read an old CD-ROM or burn a DVD. Be prepared: Your final price tag will likely be more than you thought.
Also, the MagSafe power adapter is a different design from the regular MacBook Pro. Since the retina Pro is so thin, it had to be flattened a little, plus it discards the L-shaped connector on the recent Pros with more conventional plug design that came before it and is still used by the Air. That means older power adapters are incompatible with the new Pro — an important detail if you have an external Apple display that also powers your machine via MagSafe (Apple does sell an adapter, however).
Other changes MacBook Pro veterans will notice: The power button has a new home, right where the Eject button for the DVD drive used to be (no need for that anymore). There are also some curious omissions: First, the rarely-used Audio input is gone — there’s just a solitary headphone jack now. Also absent are the handy battery-status button, its accompanying LEDs, the sleep indicator and the infrared sensor. You sacrifice a lot to have a thin body, apparently. Thankfully the keyboard is still backlit.
You can see some of those absences in the photo below, which shows the MacBook Air, Retina Pro and Pro, all stacked together (more comparisons in the gallery).
The speakers in the retina Pro have clearly been given some vitamins, although users probably won’t notice until they cue up Spotify or iTunes. Listening to Ahead by a Century by the Tragically Hip on both machines, it was easier to pick out the individual voices among the band members on the retina MacBook, and the soundstage felt wider overall, with deeper bass.
Helpfully, the fan is whisper-quiet.
The Return to Apple’s Core
Taking a step back, it’s beautiful to see so much cutting-edge technology put into a laptop: The latest processors, discrete graphics, high-speed connectivity, up to 16GB of RAM, a flash drive that can be as massive as 768GB — and of course that ultra-high-res screen.
Such a package comes with a price: It starts at $2,199, and that’s just with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. It should really be called the MacBook Pro With Retina Screen And An Eye-Popping Price Tag.
You get what you pay for, though, and in this case it’s a ticket to the future. More than even Intel has done with Ultrabooks, Apple has, with the retina MacBook Pro, drawn a dividing line between old laptops and the ones we’ll be using in the coming years.
With retina, it’s effectively obsoleted all of its other laptop designs and given its customers — and competitors — something to aspire to.
Putting the stunning retina display aside, you’ll probably be able to find a Windows machine that can beat it on an individual feature, be it speed, connectivity, convenience or storage. But as a package, nothing offers what this machine does.
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Fujitsu has announced this week that their Fujitsu LifeBook Ultrabooks will be arriving in the U.S. soon starting at around $999. Two models will be arriving the Fujitsu LifeBook U722 and the Fujitsu LifeBook UH572.
The LifeBook U722 is the higher spec model priced at $1,149, with a 14-inch, 1,280×768-pixel with edge-to-edge screen, and comes equipped with Intel’s i7 Chip, and providing 7 hours of battery life.
The Fujitsu LifeBook UH572, will be equipped with a 13.3 inch display, and Core i5 chips only, compared to the U772 model the UH572 system is a bit thicker at .71 inch thick, and heavier at 3.5 lbs, and provides only six hours of battery life.
Both models have been designed for consumers and business providing a corporate desktop replacement, coming with fingerprint security and Intel’s vPro tech for business.
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