gadget n review

Don't call it a netbook. Placing Raon Digital's featherweight powerhouse up against relative monsters like the Eee PC or MSI Wind, this between ultra-mobile and ultra-portable. Looking at a device that is tiny and fast, but at $879 is woefully overpriced. Its battery life as below that of your typical 6-cell netbook (3 hours on average or 2:15 if you can't live without WiFi), but indicates its dual-core AMD Turion X2 gives it the power to "span ultra mobile and desktop duties" .

New MacBooks from Apple are most certainly coming in the next six to eight weeks, and probably have the most extensive design overhauls in years. The new MacBooks will have a glass, multi-touch trackpad. The MacBook touch concept, is really impractical—a multi-touch screen that size will get really tiring, really fast, since it's a lot of ground to cover, and people are lazy, minimizing motion. Artists could use it to zoom in and directly manipulate images and stuff on the screen (sorta like this). It could display system stats, do Cover Flow, or anything a secondary or touchscreen would be useful for. Or, you know, act like a regular trackpad when you want it to. This is ideal, and would be a logical way to move their multi-touch technology and notebooks forward, together.

Kohjinsha's cranked out some interesting convertible UMPCs, but the new SX-series pushes the definition about as far as it can go with its chunky looks and packed feature set. You're looking at an 8.9-inch convertible wide-screen LCD, running Windows Vista Home Premium. on a 1.33GHz Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, a 60GB drive, built-in dual-layer DVD drive, WiFi, Ethernet, dual cameras, ExpressCard/34 slot, VGA out, 1segment TV tuner, card reader, and 2 USB ports, with a 4.2-hour battery life, all in a 2.7-pound unit about an inch thick. Price $1,000 to $1240 depending on options.

It's a small form factor notebook, Dell Mini Inspiron, just like the Asus Eee and the HP 2133. It's a low-cost notebook meant for developing countries. Maybe it's Atom-powered. There are 3 USB ports, a card reader, VGA out, Ethernet, and that red candy shell. I couldn't tell how big the screen was before it was tucked away into a black sleeve and ushered from the building, but it's small.