Our close blogging friends over at Netbooknews.de (We’ll be working closely at CES in Jan) have what must be the first hands-on report for the LG Xnote Z330 Ultrabook. It’s slim, attractive and comes in Core i5 and Core i7 versions, with a 128GB SSD. It will arrive on European shelves in Jan or Feb (Marketing talk for Feb!) for a reasonable, if not ground-breaking, price of 999 Euros. (Post-tax price.)
Read the full story
The Samsung Galaxy Nexus was announced last month by Google and Samsung as the first phone to run the latest version of Android, 4.0 AKA Ice Cream Sandwich.
While we knew of the large (4.65″) high resolution (1280×720) Super AMOLED display, the 5MP camera, NFC, Bluetooth 3.0, and most of the other details, Samsung stayed oddly quite about any information regarding the CPU and GPU, giving us nothing more than “1.2GHz dual-core CPU”.
Thanks to the Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo, the beans have been spilled on the Galaxy Nexus’ CPU. The 1.2GHz dual-core CPU is indeed the Texas Instruments OMAP 4460 platform which also includes the PowerVR SGX540 GPU. TI claims that the PowerVR SGX540 has up to 2x better performance than the previous SGX530 GPU. OMAP 4460 also has support for 1080p encoding (capture) and decoding (playback) at 30 FPS. Samsung’s last Nexus phone, the Nexus S [review], didn’t even record 720p video. This time around, Samsung is taking full advantage of the platform’s capabilities.
You can see full official specifications at the Samsung Galaxy Nexus tracking page in our mobile device database.
Samsung UK has confirmed Galaxy Nexus availability for November 17th, but it seems that retailers aren’t so sure about that. Amazon UK has moved the shipping date for the Galaxy Nexus from the 17th of November back to December 2nd. Amazon UK currently lists the 16GB Samsung Galaxy Nexus unlocked for £519.99, which converts to a pricey $837 USD.
Most phones in the US aren’t bought off-contract, so when it comes to typical US pricing, Android Central has shown what appears to be a leaked Costco inventory screen which prices the Samsung Galaxy Nexus at $289. The phone is expected to be available across both AT&T and Verizon in HSPA+ and LTE flavors, respectively.
Toshiba UK, operating independently from West Europe, North America and other regions have had specs, pricing and availability for the Toshiba Z830 available for a few weeks now but, for good measure, (or we suspect, a bit of timely fact regurgitation from The Register) the story is doing the rounds again today.
Toshiba UK already have model names, price and details available (details here) so all you’ll need to do is to wait for the first hands-on and then you can finally make your decision between the 4 Ultrabooks and the Ultrabook alternatives.
Interestingly, one large electronics retailer in Germany is convinced that the Z830 with be available on the 7th November [Conrad]. We’re trying to confirm this and are also looking forward to the Z830 as the first review device here on Ultrabooknews. More details on that in due course.
Via Pocket Lint
Excellent news! I was worried that the entry level Toshiba Z830 would be above €1000 but it’s not. The Toshiba Satellite Z830 Ultrabook is available for pre-order in Europe (or at least in Germany and UK) for €999. Even Amazon Germany are listing it. [Z830 At Amazon – Aff.]
Update: Toshiba UK are now listing a range of models.
The model we’ve found at at least four retailers is the Toshiba Satellite Z830-10J (4GB, Core i5 2467 @1.6Ghz, 128GB SSD and delivery estimates range through November.
The Lenovo Ideapad U300s matches the ASUS UX31 almost spec-for-spec and both appear to be ready to go. Pre-order pages are up (see our information page for the Amazon affiliate links that are available) and at least one website has one for testing. The first statement from James Kendrick, the reviewer for ZDNet was that the Lenovo U300s is “already the best Windows laptop I have ever tested.” Let’s hope there’s no showstoppers as the testing progresses.
While the U300s only has a 1366×768 resolution screen against the UX31’s 1600×900 screen, there are other differences deeper in the specifications. Customers are going to have a hard time deciding between the two…
Keeping close to the pre-tax Euro figures, the Amazon.com pre-order page shows that the Acer Aspire S3-951 will be available on the 16th October for a very competitive $899.
The price includes the Core i5 processing platform and, unique among Ultrabooks so far, a 320GB hybrid hard drive which includes a 20GB SSD partition that we assume is used by the fast-start process. There’s no USB 3.0, no Ethernet port and no VGA port though so although you’re getting a fast laptop for a low price, you’re sacrificing ports. You’re also looking at a little bit more weight than some of the more expensive options.
See our previous articles on the Acer Aspire S3 for an overview and some more thoughts on the package.
Via This is my Next
The Ultrabook timeline is padding out nicely now. The latest date is from Acer India who will have the Acer Aspire S3 Ultrabook in Croma stores from October 15th.
This is the first time we’ve heard official news of availability so we can now expect global activities starting from the 10th (Asus in New York) through the following week or two to follow with availability very soon after. I’ve been invited to visit Toshiba Europe on the 11th so hopefuly they’ll have something solid to say about availability and there’s also an Intel awareness campaign going on globally too this week with Taiwan getting some attention today, I hear.
Following a tweet by Dynamism today I took a look around to see if others were also advertising the Lenovo Ideapad U300s. Sure enough, we’ve got model details and prices available at a range of places in the USA and even an estimated shipping date. It won’t be long!
The specifications match what we were told at IFA with two models being available.
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