laptop

When you first take the 11.6-in. MacBook Air out of its box, the word "netbook" will almost certainly pop into your head. After all, the diminutive size and weight of Apple's newest ultraslim laptop -- not to mention its modest 1.4-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor -- are very netbook-like.

This midrange system does a lot at an affordable price--but it lacks any compelling extras.

Computers, notebooks and tablets are cool again – and netbooks, too

Dell, once the king of low-cost over-the-phone computer sales, has recently been trying to find its niche as a purveyor of luxury goods in what could charitably be called a stuttering economy. Having first gone for the high-end consumer market with its sleek Adamo notebookreleased in March, it has turned its sights to the corporate sector with the sleek, expensive and better equipped Latitude Z.

Toshiba, let me officially welcome you to the CULV party. Today, the company unveils its not-quite-netbooks T100 line. But get this, the baseline models (the T115) in this notebook series start selling at $449. That's right, this thing is about 50 bucks more than Toshiba's chart-busting netbook, the NB205-310.

The Toshiba mini NB205 is one of the better entries into the $400-and-under netbook market, offering a sharp display, comfortable keyboard and long battery life.

If you do any traveling, you probably haul around a lot of electronic gadgets -- laptop (or netbook), smartphone, media players, etc. There are a variety of products out there that offer a single way to power all your small mobile devices. However, only a few can handle the power needs of laptops. Innergie's mCube 90 universal adapter ($100) is one of those devices.

Overall, the new 13-, 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pros offer a very good speed boost over the respective models they replace--a boost that has more added value when you consider that the new laptops are priced lower than the older models they replace.

New laptops, netbooks...and hints of a competitor to iTunes? Asus has a lot up its sleeve these days, but let's start with the netbook that some folks in the press circles are comparing to a MacBook: the Eee PC 1008HA.

Last week Toshiba launched in a new Qosmio multimedia laptop model in Japan that includes a secondary video processing chip and, for the first time, software to automatically clean-up the quality of Web video.

in July 2008, I compared the specs of Mac laptops to those of similar Windows machines and found very little price difference. This time, I make a different comparison. Instead of starting by comparing specs and then comparing price tags, I flip the equation, asking the question: What would I get if I spent $1000 on a MacBook, and what would the same amount of money buy me in a reasonably similar Windows laptop?