Law Technology

Shopping for a New Laptop, Continued

Panasonic Y-7 – The Old Standby

This is Panasonic’s newer version of the Y-2. 14.1” screen, full 19mm pitch keyboard, built-in cd/dvd burner, lots of RAM, 160 gig hard-drive and Windows XP and weighing in at 3.3 pounds.

It even comes in colors now. The gun metal blue looks the coolest.

 Toshiba RX-1 Dynabook – The Foreign Competitor

 64 gig solid state hard drive, 2 gigs RAM, .77 inches thick. Built-in DVD burner that’s only 7 mm thick. 12.1” transflective LCD wide screen, full size 19mm keyboard (believe it or not) and an incredible 1.88 pounds.

 Dell XPS M1330 – Surprising Challenger

Dell, home of klunky generic boxes has come out with an intriguing and sexy laptop design. Who’d have thunk it?

32 gig solid state drive, 13.3 inch LED backlit screen with VGA camera (2 megapixel with the LCD screen, 2 gigs RAM, built in DVD burner, great design comes in three colors (I would probably choose the piano black) and I do not know the size of keyboard yet. Regardless of which one I choose, this looks like a high performer, with good design and Dell will have a big hit on their hands.

  Asus U3 – Dark Horse Candidate

 Thanks to Engadget for this catch. It has a 13.3” screen and specs that include integrated GPS, HDMI and S-Video outs, eSATA, USB, and Firewire ports; SD and ExpressCard 54 slots; and an NVIDIA 8400M graphics chipset -- which can be switched off via hardware for power. I don’t know the price or other detials (like weight, solid state hard drive…). It should be coming out in September, which is about the time that the other models will be available with the solid state drives.

It looks like there’s a lot of good ultra-lights out with a lot of power and it doesn’t appear that there are any ‘wrong’ choices. It should be interesting.

Full post as published by South Carolina Trial Law Blog on July 16, 2007 (boomark / email).