commonly found in significantly larger CULV laptops - but it's just as well conisdering that the Libretto is running Windows 7 Home Premium.Physical connections are unsurprisingly frugal - Toshiba's furnished the Libretto with nothing more than a USB port, a 3.5mm audio output and a MicroSD card reader - but wireless connectivity covers every base with 802.11n, Bluetooth and an optional integrated 3G adapter.Fire up the Libretto and it's immediately impressive: the twin touchscreens - yes, they're multi-touch capable - are bright and clear with not a hint of grain, and each of the 7in panels has a modest resolution of 1,024 x 600 pixels.
Initially, the Windows desktop stretches across both screens just like any multi-monitor setup. It's undeniably novel: whether you want to run different applications side by side or stretch webpages or Word documents across both displays, you can. Flip the Libretto round to hold it like a book, and the accelerometer shifts the Windows desktop around to match.
There is, of course, one crucial laptop ingredient missing from the Libretto: a keyboard. Instead, dabbing the keyboard button toggles Toshiba's software keyboard on and off. Use the Libretto in the usual laptop orientation, and, initially at least, it's a fairly unsettling experience: haptic feedback gives a clear indication as to whether you've successfully hit a key or not, but, conversely, the limited width of the display means that touch-typing is all but out of the question.
It's far from unusable, though. Mistakes are inevitable, but entering text into dialog boxes, emails or documents is made easier thanks to the T9 dictionary which throws up suggestions and corrections. Meanwhile, dabbing the on-screen keyboard icon swaps between various different keyboard layouts, such as the split keyboard which makes it possible to hold the Libretto and type with your thumbs. And should you ever need one, there's also an on-screen touchpad.
Getting the most out of such an unusual device is clearly beyond the abilities of Windows 7 Home Premium, however, and Toshiba has tried to plug the gap with its LifeSpace suite of software.
ReelTime uses a touch-friendly interface to list recently accessed documents, previewing their contents on the adjacent display, and the Bulletin Board area allows users to pin notes, documents and links to a virtual pin-board. But by far our favourite part of Toshiba's LifeSpace? There's a virtual piano.
The hardware was most definitely pre-production, suffering from sluggish fits of pique, and regularly unresponsive touchscreens, but, warts and all, it's difficult not to come away a little bit impressed.Indeed, you've got to admire the sheer chutzpah of Toshiba in releasing such a bold product. Is it practical? From our brief outing with it, we'd have to say not. Will it be affordable? Well, if by affordable you mean cheaper than, say, the iPad, then probably not.Look at it as a technological showpiece which physically embodies Toshiba's mantra of Leading Innovation, though, and it almost begins to make sense. It's innovative, thoughtfully designed and, to its credit, more than a little bit bonkers. We can't wait to get one in for a full PC Pro review.
Lenovo isn't going to hang around for the return of the Start button in the Windows 8.1 update, and has partnered with a startup to restore the much-missed Start menu.The Windows 8.1 update is due from Microsoft on 17 October - and has apparently already started rolling out to manufacturers - which will see the return of the Start button, though not the full cascading menu.Perhaps in light of that compromise, Lenovo has teamed up with software company SweetLabs to pre-install its Pokki software on PCs.The Pokki package includes an app store separate from the Windows Store, a gaming arcade and a "modern Start menu".According to Bloomberg, Pokki has been downloaded onto more than three million Windows 8 machines, with the average user opening the software more than 10 times a day.According to Lenovo, Pokki will arrive on some IdeaPad, ThinkPad and IdeaCentre models, though it didn't specify which, in the coming weeks. Bloomberg reports that Pokki will eventually come pre-loaded on all Lenovo PCs. Lenovo also stated the devices would be available in "multiple regions" globally.
SweetLabs' co-founder and chief marketing officer, Chester Ng, has said that similar partnerships are in the works, reports Bloomberg.Next to the latest crop of high-power laptops, the Acer Aspire V3 (part code: NX.M9VEK.001) looks dated. It's a beefy laptop, with a huge 17.3in display and a cheap-feeling champagne-and-black plastic chassis ¨C it isn't a patch on the svelte Apple MacBook Pro or the excellent Samsung Series 7 Chronos.However, there's no doubt this 17.3in desktop replacement is a machine from 2013: it includes one of Intel's factory-fresh Haswell processors. In fact, it's the first big laptop we've seen with a Haswell chip, and the Core i7-4702QM packs a punch. It's a quad-core chip with Hyper-Threading, so it appears to the operating system as eight virtual cores, and its 2.2GHz stock speed rises dynamically to 3.2GHz with Turbo Boost.This particular Core i7 CPU is one of Intel's weakest quad-core Haswell parts, but that wasn't obvious in our performance tests. The Acer's application benchmark score of 0.94 is exemplary: it's slightly quicker than the Samsung Series 7 Chronos, which scored 0.9 in the same tests.
The Haswell processor is partnered by a discrete graphics core ¨C an Nvidia GeForce GT 750M. This returned an excellent score of 63fps in our 1,600 x 900 Medium quality Crysis test, and at the Acer's native resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 it returned a just-about-playable 28fps ¨C enough gaming power for anyone.The rest of the specification is suitably high-end. Twelve gigabytes of RAM is more than we see in most desktops, let alone laptops, and there's a Blu-ray drive ¨C an increasingly rare commodity in laptops. Connectivity is handled by dual-band 802.11n wireless, Bluetooth 4 and Gigabit Ethernet, and the 1TB hard disk provides ample storage. There's only one downside ¨C it isn't an SSD. The drive's sequential read and write speeds of 95MB/sec and 93MB/sec are sluggish compared to the MacBook's 256GB SSD.We expect powerful laptops to suffer away from the mains, but Haswell processors are designed for efficiency as well as power, and the Acer put in a surprisingly good showing in our tests. You probably won't want to lug the 3.2kg V3 around much, but when you do, you'll get reasonable battery life. Despite its high-power components, the Acer lasted for 5hrs 54mins in our light-use test.
The 17.3in, 1,920 x 1,080 panel isn't as impressive. There's no touch support, and quality is mixed. It's bright, at 392cd/m2, but despite decent contrast of 712:1, the overall impression isn't great. The biggest problem is poor colour accuracy: the Acer's average Delta E of 7.5 is way off, and makes images look flat and insipid.The Acer's ergonomics are equally mixed. The Scrabble-tile keyboard has a solid base, and there's plenty of consistent travel on each key. The keys are full-sized, too, and there's room for a number pad. The touchpad is average, however, lacking the premium feel of the Samsung's, and Windows 8's edge-swipe gestures worked inconsistently.On the positive side, there's plenty of connectivity, with pairs of USB 2 and headphone connectors on the right-hand side, two USB 3 sockets on the left-hand edge and both D-SUB and HDMI display outputs. The front edge houses an SD card slot, and there's enough upgrade potential to keep tinkerers happy.The battery can be removed and replaced, and removing the large panel on the Aspire's underside reveals two SODIMM memory modules, the Wi-Fi adapter and a 2.5in hard disk. All of these can be replaced, and there's even room to expand, with a second 2.5in hard disk bay and one free mini PCI Express slot.
That's one reason you might consider the Acer Aspire V3 over the Samsung Series 7 Chronos. The other is the price, which at ¡ê799 is reasonable for such a powerful laptop. On every other count, though, it lags behind, with poorer display quality, shorter battery life and a cheaper design.Dell plans to sell its long-awaited 4K monitor for only $699, the company has revealed at CES 2014.Last year the company announced it would be offering the 28in "Ultra HD" P2815Q screen for less than $1,000. Now it's come in some way below that mark, with a final US price of $699, according to a report by Forbes. UK pricing wasn't available at the time of publication.The screen has a resolution of 3,840 x 2,160 and will launch globally on 23 January.Other specifications are currently thin on the ground, with Dell merely confirming that the screen will tilt, pivot and swivel, and that it will have multiple connections for "smartphones, tablets, laptops and PCs," without confirming exactly what they are.Our team on the ground at CES in Las Vegas should be able to bring you more details later this week.
4K has become a theme at this year's CES: Sony yesterday unveiled an Ultra-Short-Throw Projector that can effectively turn walls into 147in 4K displays.Netflix has also this week announced plans to stream the forthcoming series of its drama House of Cards at 4K resolution, while YouTube announced a less bandwidth-intensive technology for 4K streams.The more seductive the toys they put in front of me, the more devious I get at strategies to avoid their siren call. Flying in and out of Zurich airport, I developed the Red Watch Excuse: I only buy watches with red faces, which are very rare, therefore I can merrily ignore all the very sexy, very expensive watches with non-red faces.I wrote here about upgrading my old (and horribly unreliable, until it was repaired) MacBook Pro laptop with a solid-state drive: this was another Red Watch trick, to stop me looking at other, later, sexier MacBooks. Now, I'm carrying an HP nc4400, because it's small enough that I can ignore pretty piano-black netbooks, and it runs Vista, which hasn't done anything nasty to me yet and helps me to avoid buying one copy of Windows 7 per laptop... You begin to see the pattern here.
So when the iPad seemed imminent, I went back to my basic principles. I had already rescued my oldest laptop with a Compact Flash disk upgrade, after being obliged to fall back on it because it has a genuine, no-messing 9-pin serial port. Lots of switches and routers use a serial connection as part of the "I'm a brick, fix me" mode they occasionally enter: so replacing the 13GB rotating iron platter drive (c. 1997) with an 8GB solid state Compact Flash made perfect sense. However, for blog purposes this job is low on good evidence, because Tecra 8000's put their disks inside dent-prone alloy carrier shells, so you can't easily see what I was up to.Which is when I came across intense substitute temptation: a data-wiped Portege 7010CT. These were the executive's delight a decade and a half ago, coming with no CD in the main laptop and a somewhat chunky docking unit, carrying excellent speakers, a DVD drive with hardware decoder, a floppy - all the stuff you didn't really need while actually working.Mindful of the likely super-long-term requirement for the Tecra 8000 in switch-recovery duties, I thought: how cool would it be to have an SSD Portege? As it turns out, I was the only person to think this, because I got the whole machine for ¡ê12. That's a whole laptop, with a wiped drive admittedly, for less than it was going to cost me to buy replacement lid hinges for my wobbly-screened nc4400. I already knew how good the quality of the parts in a Portege are because lots of them are shared with the Tecras, and I definitely wanted something I could write on - which means a good keyboard, a clear screen, longish battery life and ideally, no ability to connect to the internet whatsoever. The Portege looked ideal.
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