Mobile Buyers' Guide, December 2009
by Jarred Walton on December 6, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Lots of Options
There are so many options out there that even with 9000+ words, I feel like I've glossed over many areas. You can see that our focus has tended towards laptops we've had hands-on time with, but we looked at pricing from online vendors like Newegg, Buy.com, and others to try and flesh things out. Even with those efforts, we have undoubtedly missed some great laptops. What we've tried to do is to give you a good idea of the features and performance you can expect with a variety of components.
Grab an Atom netbook and you'll get Atom performance and battery life; the same goes for CULV designs, but there's a huge difference in pricing based on aesthetics and how thin a particular model happens to be. For the higher end options, most users are looking for either better GPUs or better CPUs, or a good SSD. SSDs can be added to pretty much anything with a noticeable boost to performance when you launch applications, which is nice, but even the fastest SSD won't help you improve frame rates on a slow GPU, and it won't magically cause an Atom CPU to crunch numbers faster.
Simply put, there are a ton of laptop options. We've mentioned Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Gateway, Lenovo, and a few other brands where they looked interesting. Still, we have certainly missed some potentially interesting laptops. Take a quick look at the Lenovo ThinkPads and you'll see how many models there are.
Sony has a lot of options as well, with prices that are typically higher than the competition. We mentioned the one VAIO as being the sole high contrast LCD we could find at local retail stores, but that doesn't mean all VAIO laptops have good LCDs – most were just as bad as the other laptops we looked at. Sony also has some odd limitations with how you configure your laptop, like allowing different colors only if you upgrade the CPU and/or GPU on some models. Weird. Still, Sony has some laptops that come very close to the level of Apple design, if that's your thing.
We could spend another couple weeks looking at all the interesting laptops from various vendors, and that's all without running a single benchmark. It you've ever shopped for laptops and felt overwhelmed, we feel your pain. Whether you simply want long battery life or you're after the ultimate in portable performance, we hope we've given you some ideas of what to look for with this Mobile Buyers' Guide.
Open Mic Night
We know we talked about reviews of several laptops in the past month, and those are still coming, but we wanted to detour for a bit to look at the big picture of what's available and how much it will typically cost. With the stage set, we're going to shut up and let you do the talking. Do you have a favorite laptop? Sound off in the comments and let us know. The mic is now yours, so let us hear your input.
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JarredWalton - Monday, December 7, 2009 - link
I've placed an order... I'll do a review if they work well.yacoub - Sunday, December 6, 2009 - link
http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/bto/20091118/by-manf....">http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/bto/20091118/by-manf....I can't find the initial article anymore but this just came out a couple weeks ago.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10400447-1.htm...">http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10400447-1.htm...
HP had the most quality issues, Asus the least.
Blahman - Sunday, December 6, 2009 - link
If you thought the UL80Vt was good, check out its newer slimmer brother: the UL30Vt. It shares all the same specs, but better build quality and all packed into a thinner, lighter chassis.It's available from Amazon for $800. The reviews so far are very positive.
http://www.amazon.com/UL30Vt-X1-13-3-Inch-Laptop-W...">http://www.amazon.com/UL30Vt-X1-13-3-In...ctronics...
trickdaddy111m - Tuesday, December 8, 2009 - link
The UL30Vt does look very nice, but it lacks discrete graphics and the Turbo function of the UL80Vt. So, "same specs" is not accurate.KikassAssassin - Wednesday, December 9, 2009 - link
The UL30Vt has turbo and the discrete graphics. The specs are exactly the same as the UL80Vt except it has a 1" smaller screen, no optical drive, and a slightly smaller battery.You're probably looking at the UL30A.
KikassAssassin - Sunday, December 6, 2009 - link
The UL30Vt looks like a really nice alternative if you want something lighter than the UL80Vt and you don't need an optical drive. Unfortunately, the UL30Vt on Amazon is the X1 model that only has a 4400 mAh battery, compared to the UL80Vt-A1's 5600 mAh battery, so it'll only have about 80% of the battery life. The battery life should still be excellent, just not quite as amazing as the UL80Vt'stechwriters4breakfast - Sunday, December 6, 2009 - link
atom 2arrandale
bsoft16384 - Sunday, December 6, 2009 - link
I just want to give another shout out for the Acer 1410. This is an absolutely fantastic notebook for $400.I have the single-core version (Core 2 Solo SU3500, 1.4GHz, 3M cache) so it's somewhat faster on single-threaded code but slower on multi-threaded code than the Celeron SU2300 (1.2GHz, 1M cache). That said, I have no performance complaints about the laptop.
GPU performance is, as you would expect, pretty bad. But it's still dramatically ahead of a GMA950-based netbook (around 5X by my estimations), which makes it fine for playing older titles like Warcraft III, CS 1.6, UT classic or 2004, Quake 3 / OpenArena, Half-Life.
Even WoW runs "OK" on the Acer 1410, as long as you're willing to deal with ~20-30 FPS and a slideshow in Dalaran. But you *can* run it, and it's fine for doing dailies or checking the AH. I have my desktop if I want to play for real.
The keyboard is excellent, except for the page up/down buttons (which are annoyingly above the arrow keys) and home/end (combined with page up / down). Other than those annoyances, the keyboard is full-sized and has the layout that you would expect.
The screen is decently bright; contrast is "OK" but not great, and the viewing angle is lame (but so are most laptops). It's easily better than my ThinkPad T61.
There are some surprises port-wise: the 1410 has HDMI (with 8-channel LPCM audio) and the audio-out port does SPDIF/TOSLINK (with a 3.5mm to TOSLINK adapter), neither of which are common on a $400 laptop.
The WiFi is Intel 5100 802.11n, which is also nice. Ethernet is Atheros, audio is Realtek.
As you would expect with an ULV notebook, the 1410 doesn't really ever get hot, even at 100% CPU / GPU. It's not particularly noisy either, unless you have a defective fan (as my first one from Amazon did).
The 1410 takes forever to charge from empty (2.5 hours if off, 3-4 if on). That's because it uses the same 30W power supply as the Aspire One. On the other hand, the power adapter is very small and decently cheap, both of which are pluses.
Battery life is 5-6 hours, depending on how hard you push the machine. At idle, at minimum brightness, Windows reports over 12 hours, but you can't achieve this in practice. With light web browsing and Flashblock, expect 6+ hours.
The touchpad is Synaptics, and does multi-touch.
This system is the smallest, lightest system that I would consider a 'notebook' rather than a 'netbook'. I considered the HP Mini 311, but it maxes out at 3GB and doesn't support x86-64 or virtualization, plus the Core 2 Solo beats the pants off of the Atom. NVIDIA ION isn't really a whole lot better than the GMA X4500MHD, because the Atom CPU prevents you from playing any modern games anyway and the GMA X4500 does fine for Windows Aero and HD video acceleration.
Two years ago the Aspire 1410 would have cost $2000 and would be called an 'ultralight'. Today it's $400.
Keeir - Wednesday, December 9, 2009 - link
Don't forget its slightly more expensive brotherTimeline 1810T-8
Core 2 Duo (SU7300), 4 Gigs of Ram, Bluetooth, Larger HD, same wieght and battery
Picked mine up for <600 from Amazon (though I see they have ballons to close to 700)
notanakin - Monday, December 7, 2009 - link
Unfortunately this guide came out just a few days too late, but fortunately I'd settled on the Acer 1410 (SU2300) and it's a nice little machine. Certainly fast enough for simple tasks and for my old eyes the screen size is better than the 10.1 inchers.Here's a very useful link to a table of laptops/CPUs/Screen size prepared for the recent PC Show in Singapore where I bought the laptop. Great for doing some quick comparisons.
(Prices are in Singapore $ - about US$1=S$1.4, so the prices are a bit more expensive than in the USA, but they give some discounts off the published price and throw in stuff - I got an external DVD-writer plus a few smaller things with the Acer.)
But how I HATE the glossy screen. Are they cheaper than matte screens or what? I'd gladly pay US$50 more for a matte screen.