The HP Chromebook 14 was popular and well-received. Maybe it was because of the 14-inch screen but I think in general it was the build quality, the keyboard and the Haswell-architecture performance that did it. It was an all-round quality Chromebook.  The new HP Chromebook 14 has an updated design, screen options and has switched from X86 to ARM in the processor department. Battery life is improved as a result.

Surface Pro 3 is an amazing piece of engineering. Even with the keyboard it’s one of the most powerful self-contained PCs by weight and with 5-6 hours of working battery life, fast storage and a digitizer it doesn’t cut corners. We’d all like to see a full SD card slot and for it to run a little cooler under load but unless you’re really doing a lot of ‘lapping’, it’s a true notebook replacement. Now that the Intel Core M has been launched we have an idea of what’s possible for 2015. Core M […]

The Acer C270 and Lenovo N20p look similar. They weigh the same and have the same screen size but there’s a lot of difference between the two. The usage scenarios are as far apart as you could possibly get and yet they both do a great job. If you’ve been looking at these Chromebooks and wondering which one you prefer, this video will help.

Chromebooks hit 1 million sales in Q2 of this year and we expect that number to rise sharply after the Q3 ‘back to school’ numbers are in because that’s where Chromebooks appear to be having their biggest impact. 42% of Chromebook sales are in the reseller space. In a presentation at the Intel Developer Forum last week we saw Intel’s vision for Chromebook differentiation. Obviously they highlighted all their platform advantages including media decoding, low power states, fast start, wake-on-wireless and wake-on-voice.  Intel also highlighted the security model that most […]

There’s ‘value’ and there’s ‘cheap.’ The Toshiba Encore Mini falls into the latter group and even at $119 it’s got too many issues to be recommended for most types of user. The Toshiba Encore Mini was one of the first devices I got hands-on with at IFA earlier this month and although it was an attractive size it was immediately clear that it had cut many corners. The screen, a non-IPS panel of just 768×1280 resolution, is terrible. Even my eyes, old and tired, saw jaggies and poor viewing angles.

It had to happen on #13 right? On my recent 14-day tour of IFA and IDF (Berlin, San Francisco) I prepared myself with four devices. One Windows laptop. One Chromebook. One smartphone and one featurephone. What I didn’t plan for was a total failure of the main Windows laptop. Chromebooks don’t work as a fallback laptop. Everything had gone very smoothly with my Haswell-based Ultrabook. The platform has great battery life (in this case, all-day working without a charge) and 1080p video editing and rendering for my (admittedly basic) YouTube […]

The Intel Core M processor, officially launched last week, offers Ultrabook performance in a processing unit that’s about half the size of the current CPUs found in Ultrabooks with a 6W TDP profile. What does that mean? I’ve seen it benchmarked to Ultrabook performance levels on an 680gram fanless tablet. It works!

In an Intel-led Core M benchmarking meeting today I saw a set of controlled benchmarks from a 6W TDP Core M product. The tests were performed in an 685 gram 12.5-inch Llama Mountain reference tablet with a machined aluminum rear casing that is optimal for this design. We also saw a copper-based rear casing that can handle a lot more thermal energy but you won’t see that happening in consumer products. The benchmark scores we saw were more than I had expected.   Over at Ultrabooknews: Intel Core M Overview, benchmarks […]