Samsung’s Sleek R80 Series Notebooks: Color them Red

First it was beige, then it was black and now the color of today’s notable notebooks depends on which way the fashion winds are blowing. Samsung is hardly a stranger to this trend and proves it with a raft of sleek-looking notebooks poised to debut exclusively at Best Buy on Sunday.

At a press preview in New York Thursday, Samsung showed off its new R80 series notebooks, which feature the company’s Crystal Wave body design. A clear coat protects a colorful metallic shell with wavy designs etched in. The result, according to a Samsung representative, is a durable case which will still looks good after hard use.

Samsung’s R780 ($930), R580 ($830) and R480 ($730) notebooks come with 17.3-, 15.6- and 14-inch HD LED displays respectively and 500-gigabyte hard disks. The R780 and R580 come with muscular Intel Core i5 processors and high-end nVidia GeForce GT 330M or 310M graphics engines while the R480 uses a less-robust, but certainly adequate Intel Core i3 processor and a medium-strength Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics chipset.

Somewhat surprisingly, the R480 and R580 come with Blu-ray players while the R780 is outfitted with a DVD burner. All of the R80 series units are long on connectivity options, offering three (R480) or four (R780, R580) USB 2.0 ports in addition to HDMI, video, audio, gigabit Ethernet, memory card and ExpressCard slots. The new units also feature built-in webcams, microphones and Wi-Fi adapters and the R780 includes a Bluetooth adapter as well.

During an assortment of demonstrations at the Samsung Experience at the Time Warner Center in New York, Samsung representatives demonstrated how the Blu-ray-enabled R80 notebooks could send HD video feeds to nearby televisions while having enough processor and graphics muscle left over for notebook users to surf the Web, edit documents or perform other tasks without cyber hiccups.

The R480 and R580 notebooks will be available at Best Buy retail stores March 7 while the R780 will be available online only via BestBuy.com.

Text and photo Copyright 2010 Stadium Circle Features

Lenovo's new ThinkStation: Slam dunk or technical foul?

It's not often that a press conference takes technology journalists to a sporting goods store, but that's exactly what happened Nov. 6 as Lenovo staged a televised press event at the NBA Store on New York's Fifth Ave. to announce its entry into a workstation market now dominated by Dell and Hewlett-Packard.

According to Lenovo, the new ThinkStation line of workstations marks the first new workstation brand to be trotted out by a major PC maker in ten years and marks Lenovo's first addition to its Think-branded products in five years.

By definition, a workstation is a musclebound PC with extra processing and graphics power for high-octane applications such as computer-aided design and digital content creation -- such the nifty graphics and videos you see during televised National Basketball Association games.

Lenovo is already the official computer of the NBA; which explains the reason for the press conference site. Its units are at courtside at all 29 arenas of the 30 NBA teams (the Los Angeles Lakers and Clippers share the Staples Center). Company executives said the China-based company aimed to get a modest slice of the U.S. workstation market but sought to succeed in emerging markets overseas as well.

The single-processor ThinkStation S10 (starting at $1,199) will come with an Intel Corp. Core 2 processor while the dual-processor ThinkStation D10 (pictured at top, starting at $1,739) will use Intel's Quad-Core Xeon processors. Both models will come with nVidia graphics adapters and will feature second-generation PCI Express expansion slots, which allow for far faster graphics-data speeds than the original PCI Express standard.

Inside the easy-to-service ThinkStations you'll find room for an array of hard disks and lots of RAM as well as extra fans and huge heat sinks to keep things cool.

While the ThinkStations will come in black, their interiors will be quite green, according to the company. More than 50 per cent of the plastics used will be recycled plastics, Lenovo said. Despite the additional hardware, the units will be no noisier than far less powerful PCs, according to Lenovo.

On hand for the press conference was former NBA star and Basketball Hall of Fame member Bill Walton (at right in photo), who seemed to genuinely appreciate the extra processing power of workstations and said he couldn't wait to get his own hands on a ThinkStation.

"Intel doesn't have the out-front name, but they're the ones that make it work from the inside," said the almost 7-foot-tall Walton, who was joined by executives from Lenovo, Intel and the NBA as well as sportscaster Ian Eagle.

ThinkStation D10 photo courtesy of Lenovo.
Press conference photo copyright 2007, Stadium Circle Features.