CES 2010: Arrandale Arrives

Acer, Gateway, and Lenovo

I've gone through just three companies' worth of PR and images, and I'm only about half way through the CES laptop announcements. Rather than delay this further to sort through Sony, Toshiba, Samsung, and other companies, I'm going to wrap things up here with a few other quick blurbs. I'll see about adding the other companies I just listed in the near future. For now, here are a few last words about Acer and Gateway.

Gateway Pine Trail and CULV

Gateway sent me some images and details on a few of their new laptops. The Gateway LT21 is another 10.1" Pine Trail netbook with battery life listed as 8+ hours. It weighs 2.76 pounds and should be available shortly for around $350 MSRP. It comes in three colors, the red LT2118u, black LT2119u, and the white LT2120u.

Gateway also announced an update to their EC series, with the more interesting option being the new EC14D. It's an 11.6" laptop, but it manages to cram in an optical drive along with other standard CULV options. Pentium SU4100, 4GB DDR2, 320GB HDD, and a 1366x768 LCD are available later this month for an MSRP of $630. Meanwhile the EC58 is an alternative to the EC54 with a 15.6" LCD (still running at 1366x768). Pricing for the EC58 starts at $650.

Acer Arrandale

Like everyone else, Acer has some Arrandale (Core i3 and i5) notebooks to announce. The Aspire 5740 starts at just $750 with a Core i5-430M (2.26GHz + 2.53GHz Turbo). That's not the fastest Core i5 CPU by any stretch, but it will compete very well against older Core 2 Duo processors. The 5740 has a 15.6" 1366x768 LCD, 4GB DDR3-1066 RAM, 500GB 5400RPM HDD, 8X DVDR, and all the other usual features like Acer 802.11n WiFi. It also includes an ATI HD 5650 GPU for decent gaming performance, with the all-important ability to switch to integrated graphics in order to cut power and improve battery life. Weight is just over 6 pounds and battery life is listed as up to 4 hours - not a lot, but it's good for a 15.6" laptop that provides good performance.

The Aspire 7740 is a larger 17.3" chassis that is also priced at $750, but with some changes in the components. It uses a Core i3-330M CPU (2.13GHz and no Turbo), and it drops the discrete graphics on the base model. In contrast it adds a 1600x900 LCD and a Blu-ray drive, along with Intel WiFi 1000 networking. It weighs just over 7 pounds with battery life of up to 3.5 hours. Other models of the 5740 and 7740 will have different components and pricing, naturally.

Lenovo - More to Come!

We close with some parting shots from Lenovo. We already discussed some of the new ThinkPad designs from Lenovo (included in the above gallery are a few new images), and Lenovo isn't through with interesting new concepts. Lenovo announced on Wednesday the first hybrid laptop for consumers, the IdeaPad U1. What's a hybrid laptop? At first blush it looks like a tablet PC, but the catch is that it has two complete CPUs/OSes. The screen contains a Qualcomm Snapdragon ARM processor, and you can remove the display from the rest of the chassis and carry it around. The OS for the tablet is Lenovo's customized Skylight OS (which will also appear in the Lenovo Skylight 2 lbs. alternative netbook this spring), and it synchronizes with the Win7 OS on the main body when connected. Battery life for the tablet portion is listed at 5 hours for 3G Web browsing or up to 10 hours when idle. The IdeaPad U1 will be available in the summer.