Archive for March, 2008

Dell laptop with Blu-Ray for under $1000

Friday, March 28th, 2008

Dell Blu-Ray laptop for $1000
With the format war over, we haven’t seen a great plethora of new Blu-Ray integrated products now that sitting on the fence isn’t an option. Neither have we seen the usual great price hikes associated with a monopolistic market. In fact Dell are now offering a laptop with a Blu-Ray drive (not burner) for under US$1000.

Their Inspiron 1525 laptop range start as low as US$879 with a Blu-Ray Disc Combo option, tack on another $200 for the Blu-Ray burner. Here are the specs on the $879 Blu-Ray player, err, laptop

* Intel Core 2 Duo T5550 1.83 GHz
* Vista Home Basic
* 15.4 inch 1280 x 800 res display
* Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100
* 1 GB DDR2
* 80 GB SATA hard disc drive
* Dell Wireless 802.11g card
* 28 Whr battery

And of course your Blu-Ray combo drive. The laptop has an HDMI output so you can hook it up to your HD home system and supports 720p.

So $879 for a laptop/Blu-Ray player, not bad, eh? Obviously the specs are nothing special, but if you’re looking for a basic laptop and a HD player then this could be a great option. Hopefully this also heralds price reductions with other Blu-Ray integrated hardware.

LaCie launch new Desktop Hard Drive and Mobile Drive

Wednesday, March 12th, 2008

LaCie 1TB Desktop Hard Disk
LaCie Desktop Hard Disk
LaCie Mobile Disk
LaCie have obviously been quite busy as they have just launched a whole raft of external hard drives for both desktops and laptops. The desktop range, cunningly entitled LaCie Desktop Hard Drive, comes in three sizes, 320 GB, 500 GB and 1 TB with the 1 TB big boy having a larger form factor too. The laptop range, called LaCie Mobile Disk, comes in a variety of sizes from 80 GB up to 320 GB. Here are a few more details on the new drives

Desktop Hard Drive

* Hi speed USB 2.0 interface
* 7,200 rpm
* 8 MB cache (16 MB on the 1TB version)
* 480 Mbps transfer rate
* 41 x 113 x 194 mm (115 x 65 x 208 mm for the 1TB version)
* 900g (1800g for the big boy)
* Plays nicely with W2K upwards and Mac OS X 10.3 or higher

Mobile Disk

* USB mini connectivity
* 5,400 rpm
* 8 MB cache
* 480 Mbps transfer rate
* 81 x 128 x 15 mm
* 170g
* Plays nicely with W2K upwards and Mac OS X 10.3 or higher

There’s no official price tags for these suckers on the LaCie website at the moment, but rumour has it that they’ll start at US$125 and go from there. So as long as rumour is right and the price tags are reasonable these drives may be a worthwhile investment and they certainly look the part.

Source: Electronista