Feature Articles

The Notebooks of Yore - Portable Past Meets Future

By Aloysius Low - 26 Mar 2009

Timeline: 2007

2007


  • 2007 was an exciting year for notebooks with new technologies and operating systems to steal the cash from your wallets. Vista started making a much more frequent appearance on notebooks, and it was with great excitement that we previewed the ASUS W5Fe, an ultraportable that was the first to feature Vista's SideShow, which was basically "an extra display panel feature for users to access media files, check their e-mails and other information bits, all without completely powering on their notebooks or desktops".

 The ASUS W5Fe uses Vista's SideShow technology to give you your emails and play your media files without booting up. Yay!

  • This was also another Intel year, especially with yet another new Centrino platform, the fourth generation Santa Rosa. This time around, Intel added a whole slew of features such as HDMI support, FSB support of up to 800MHz, draft-N wireless and most importantly, Dynamic Acceleration technology. Dynamic Acceleration technology allowed notebooks using Intel's Santa Rosa platform with multi-core processors to automatically detect when only a single core is being used, and then shut down the second core to save power while overclocking the first core.

  • One of the better Santa Rosa notebooks that we encountered during the course of the year was the Dell XPS M1330 which was a significant departure from the usual staid and uninspired Dell design. With its bright red color and gorgeous design, the M1330 was not only a looker, but it was also a capable performer, which given its XPS heritage, was of no surprise to those in the know. We liked the notebook so much that we gave it our Editor's Choice Award and a 4.5-star rating.

The Dell XPS M1330 still has the power to make us drool.

  • Sony's slick and chic VAIO VGN TZ series too made its appearance in our labs and wowed us with its slim form factor and exorbitant price tag. This was due to the expensive Solid State Drive used on the TZ18GN model, which jacked up the price to $4499. While it had a great design aesthetically and a well engineered build, the performance and usage experience was not quite perfect, due to the amount of bloatware found on the laptop. The 1GB of RAM that the VAIO was equipped didn't help with coping with the performance issues, so it was with a heavy heart that we couldn't give this beautifully engineered machine a much better score than 4 stars.

Awesome design and superb engineering made the Sony VAIO VGN-TZ18GN a drool worthy machine. It was however let down by bloatware and the exorbitant cost.

  • 2007 was also the beginning of the mini-notebook phenomenon with the introduction of the ASUS Eee PC. It was so popular that it ended up being sold out everywhere, thanks to its extremely cheap price of S$598 and miniature form factor. The success of the ASUS Eee PC soon spawned clones attempting to cash in on its success, though it wasn't until 2008 and the introduction of the Intel Atom processor did ASUS started facing serious competition.

Dont' cha wish your mini-notebook was hot like this?

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