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Gadgets Toshiba, ASUS Unveil New Laptops
Shane McGlaun (Blog) - June 26, 2009 11:13 AM

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22 comment(s) - last by Tamale.. on Jun 29 at 9:38 AM

Asus G60 (Source: Ubergizmo)

ASUS whips out new gaming notebook while Toshiba goes mainstream and glossy

For a long time notebooks only came in one color -- ugly beige. Things got a bit better when notebooks started to hit the market with more attractive designs in gray or black cases. Today there are all sorts of notebook colors to choose from on the market.

One of the things that many notebook makers are doing now is using highly glossy plastics with their machines, which only look good the first time you use them. For the rest of the notebooks life it will be covered with smudges and fingerprints. Toshiba has unveiled new Satellite M500 and U500 notebooks with a highly glossy finish this week. Engadget reports the glossy plastic soaks up the fingerprints in person. The researcher who designers a coating that repels fingerprints on glossy surfaces will be the next millionaire.

The looks are the most interesting aspect of the otherwise boring notebooks, that and the fact that the rigs are Windows 7 ready. The A500 has a 16-inch LCD and starts at $749.99 with the U500 starting at $849.99 and offering a 13.3-inch LCD.

ASUS has unveiled its latest gaming laptop called the G60 and the machine carries the Republic of Gamers brand. The 16-inch laptop has debuted in Europe and there is no word on when the beast will hit store shelves in America.

Specifications for the G60 include 4GB of RAM, 320GB HDD up to a 1TB SSD. The mere thought of the price of a 1TB SSD option is enough to cause heart palpitations in many consumers. The G60 will sport a Blu-ray drive and will have a GeForce GTX 260M graphics card. That GPU and the other hardware is enough to push the rig to a score of over 10,000 on 3Dmark06 reports Pocket-Lint. The machine will hit stores in Europe this September at about $2500.

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*snickers*

By Totally on 6/26/2009 11:35:07 AM , Rating: 2

quote:
The researcher who designers a coating that repels fingerprints on glossy surfaces will be the next millionaire.

RE: *snickers*

By Aloonatic on 6/26/2009 11:42:57 AM , Rating: 1

Mmmmm snickers

*mouth falls open, tongue falls out, drools*

Arrrrrrrrghhhhhhhhh

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RE: *snickers*

By Cypherdude1 on 6/27/2009 6:54:45 AM , Rating: 4

Instead of focusing on the looks, the superficial parts, how about working on more difficult to change features? How about making eSATA standard? eSATA is much faster than USB2.0 and can be used with external user-assembled drives.

Also, besides being cheaper to manufacture, why did the laptop industry make the "widescreen" aspect ratio the default standard? Pick up a piece of paper. Does it look like a widescreen to you?! NO! Whenever you want to write a paper or work on a spreadsheet, you'll want a standard aspect ratio, not widescreen. Widescreen is for seeing movies, not work. People don't buy laptops to just see movies.

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RE: *snickers*

By bigboxes on 6/27/2009 4:03:46 PM , Rating: 2

I'll agree with you on eSata, but respectfully disagree with you on the widescreen part of your rant. I rarely watch movies on my widescreen. Widescreen is just that -- a wider screen with more real estate. I am a big multi-tasker and it helps a lot to have more desktop space in which to work on. It's almost maddening to have to switch between tasks instead of having them spread out on the screen. Yeah, there is the occasional video, but that's all gravy!

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RE: *snickers*

By Tamale on 6/29/2009 9:38:56 AM , Rating: 2

to be fair, keep in mind most of these widescreen aspect ratios come at the cost of vertical pixels.. not just an increase in horizontal ones.

I'm a big fan of 1680x1050 on a laptop. it's wide enough to see two documents clearly, and tall enough to work on them without too much scrolling. sadly, these seem to keep getting replaced with 1400x900 or even worse, 1366x768 displays.. and the loss of VERTICAL pixels is the worst part about that.

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RE: *snickers*

By Aloonatic on 6/29/2009 4:23:54 AM , Rating: 2

Who said anything about looks?

I just suddenly had hankering for a peanut filled, caramel and nougat based candy/chocolate bar :)

As for looks over substance and standard ports, I'm with you there. However, Windows laptop manufacturers do need to step up and tack aesthetics a little more seriously.

With regards to paper/screens, then that's a bit of a weird rant. A wide-screen looks a lot more like a landscape piece of paper than a non-wide-screen screen looks like any standard paper size that I've ever seen. When I work on spread sheets, on my wide-screen desktop PC, I tend to use all the width, or if I'm using word or whatever, it leaves a little screen real estate free for other things. When reviewing 2 documents, side-by-side, the wide screen helps there too.

If you don't like the wide-screen, just tape off part of it or something? Maybe that will make you happy, and perhaps a visit to your doctor about the rage might be worth it, those few minutes may extend your life considerably judging by the capitalised and bold "no" in your comment. wide-screen displays really are not that big an issue.

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RE: *snickers*

By Proton on 6/29/2009 7:10:10 AM , Rating: 2

USB 3 is supposed to be even faster than eSata.

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RE: *snickers*

By theapparition on 6/29/2009 7:16:58 AM , Rating: 2

quote:
Also, besides being cheaper to manufacture, why did the laptop industry make the "widescreen" aspect ratio the default standard? Pick up a piece of paper. Does it look like a widescreen to you?! NO! Whenever you want to write a paper or work on a spreadsheet, you'll want a standard aspect ratio, not widescreen.

Yes......but next time take a look at your desk. Does it look square and deepish or wide? Wide helps you place many of those sheets of paper together so you can do more than just one thing.

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RE: *snickers*

By Zingam on 6/26/09, Rating: 0

RE: *snickers*

By Zaphod Beeblebrox on 6/26/2009 3:01:35 PM , Rating: 2

Drywall Texture spray!

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RE: *snickers*

By KorruptioN on 6/26/2009 4:15:28 PM , Rating: 3

Rhino Liner.

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RE: *snickers*

By inperfectdarkness on 6/26/2009 3:53:09 PM , Rating: 2

$20 shipped from ebay will get you a cool vinyl laptop skin to put on the cover. no smudges on mine--and it looks way cooler (now) than any laptop case on the market.

/problem.

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10,000+ 3DMark

By nvalhalla on 6/26/2009 3:31:12 PM , Rating: 2

That's really a sad number for how much they'll be charging for these. I have an MSI gaming laptop I put together for under $700 that gets 6700. NVidia needs to release some new mobile GPUs, these revisions of 8800s are really annoying. Mobile graphics were just starting to catch up to desktops, it seems they might be slipping back again.

RE: 10,000+ 3DMark

By GodisanAtheist on 6/26/2009 11:09:45 PM , Rating: 2

Whatever happened to ATI's line of mGPU's? Last I remember they offered the same SP count/memory as their desktop counterparts, albeit at a lower clockrate.

There was this big to-do about the 4800m's being released and then nothing...

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RE: 10,000+ 3DMark

By kenji4life on 6/27/2009 2:51:55 AM , Rating: 3

Maybe you haven't been paying attention. but laptops featuring everything from the 4330m all the way up to a 4870m X2 are available.

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Quality

By MrHanson on 6/26/2009 4:04:22 PM , Rating: 2

What are the quality of ASUS laptops? I saw the ASUS g71gx at best buy for just a little over $1100. Even though that is just the duel core version with the geforce 260m, I thought that was quite inexpensive compared to a laptop I bought 5 years ago.

RE: Quality

By Jdecarol on 6/27/2009 6:44:08 AM , Rating: 3

Notebookreview.com has a sub forum dedicated to asus laptops. Some people have been seeing the new ones for that last week or so in Bestbuy and trying ot benchmark them.

On the G51 the GPU hits over 100C (Yes I mean C), and the G71 for some reason is downclocking to almost off when it hits 82C.

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Pic

By Jephph on 6/26/2009 12:00:20 PM , Rating: 2

Pic= All your base are belong to us

RE: Pic

By smackababy on 6/26/2009 2:56:55 PM , Rating: 2

We get signal?

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to hell with glossy

By MamiyaOtaru on 6/26/2009 6:22:51 PM , Rating: 3

I will never buy a glossy laptop (looking at you all EEEs newer than the original 900). I will never buy a glossy screen (monitor, or attached to a laptop).

I know most people are idiots and are attracted to the shiny, but surely there's some company out there that would be happy to seize a niche among the non idiots.

Fixed...

By PlasmaBomb on 6/28/2009 9:12:38 AM , Rating: 2

quote:
Specifications for the G60 include 4GB of RAM, 320GB HDD up to a 1TB SSD. The mere thought of all that p0rn is enough to cause heart palpitations in many consumers.

sigh

By Jdecarol on 6/29/2009 8:36:44 AM , Rating: 2

Naturally the only places I can find any of these new laptops is bestbuy, who says they don't know when they will get them in since it is showing as "in transit".