Notebooks and Netbooks Take Center Stage at the 2009 CES

by Scott Ferguson

The Toshiba Portege R600 is an ultraportable, lightweight laptop for enterprise users and SMBs. The Portege R600 offers a 12.1-inch display and an ultra-low-volt Intel processor. The laptop weighs about 2.4 pound and measures less than 1 inch thick. Pricing starts at about $2,000.

The Toshiba Portege A600 is a slightly heavier but less expensive version of the Portege R600. The A600 weighs about 3.2 pounds but still uses an Intel processor and costs about $1,300.

In addition to its other notebooks, Toshiba showed off a special version of its Portege R600 laptop at the 2009 CES. This version of the R600 is running Sun Microsystems’ Solaris operating systems instead of Microsoft Windows.

At the 2009 CES, Sony made big news with the debut of its Vaio Lifestyle VGN-P500 laptop. This extremely small notebook offers an 8-inch LCD display and uses an Intel processor running at 1.33GHz. It also offers 2GB of main memory and an option for a solid-state drive. Pricing for the 1.4-pound notebook starts at about $899.

The MSI Wind Notebook U100 is an example of several netbooks that were on display at this year’s CES expo. This netbook offers an Intel Atom processor and a 2.5-inch hard disk drive, and it runs Microsoft Windows XP.

The Dell Mini Inspiron 910 is a netbook that uses an Intel Atom processor, but instead of Windows it runs the Ubuntu operating system.

Here’s an example of an Asus Eee PC running an Intel Atom processor.

The Acer Aspire One-03 is another example of the small-form-factor netbooks that were on wide display at the 2009 CES. This Acer Aspire is using an Intel Atom processor and is running Microsoft Windows XP.

The Hewlett-Packard Elitebook 2730P debuted a few months before the 2009 CES, but it’s a laptop that HP hopes will appeal to small and midsize business users.

For the first time ever, HP showed off its new HP Pavilion dv2 notebook at the 2009 CES expo. This HP notebook offers a 12.1-inch display and is built around Advanced Micro Devices’ new “Yukon” platform for ultraportable and lightweight notebooks.

The HP Mini 2140 is a type of mininotebook that Hewlett-Packard believes will appeal to more business users than will a typical netbook. The Mini 2140 uses an Intel Atom processor and offers more robust configurations compared with HP’s other mininotebooks and netbooks.