Notebooks galore tip up at CES

WHILE INDUSTRY PUNDITS have been telling us that notebooks are going the way of the dodo and free parking there seem to be shedloads of them at CES.

MSI announced the launch of a range of X-Slim notebooks today, unveiling the 13-inch X350, X360, 14-inch X420, and 15.6-inch X620 models.

All of MSI's new X-Slim notebooks feature the Intel CULV platform with Intel Core 2 Duo processors.

The MSI X420 has a 14-inch HD widescreen display in 16:9 format, with HDMI and Bluetooth. The X420 weighs in at 1.5kg including battery and is less than an inch thick. The new X420 is specially equipped with the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5430 discrete graphics card with 1GB DDR3 VRAM, Intel's Core 2 Duo processor, and MSI's exclusive 3D Boost technology. MSI tells us it can last for nine hours - the battery, not the computer. It also supports both 3.5G and WiMAX wireless technologies.

The slimline MSI X620 comes equipped with a 15.6-inch, 16:9 cinematic LED backlit display with support for HD output. With a built in ATI Mobility Radeon HD discrete graphics card, the new generation X620 also features the unique 3D Boost button making it great for gaming. The X620 comes with a built-in 2-spindle optical drive. It also comes with an eight-cell battery giving the X620 10 hours of battery life.

Other notebooks included in MSI's newI X-Slim range are the 13.4-inch X350 and X360 models.

Meanwhile rival Asus is announcing some stylish designs for its new laptop range. It tells us that five of its products won the CES 2010 Innovations Design and Engineering awards so they must run well.

Industrial designer Karim Rashid's touch is fairly clear in the new Eee PC Seashell 1008P which appears in colours like "Hot Pink" and matte "Coffee Brown". Under the bonnet is the new Intel Atom N450 processor and it runs Windows 7, Express Gate and something called Super Hybrid Engine. Apparently it goes 14 hours between recharges.

Other Asus notebook models include the NX90 Bang and Olufsen ICEpower notebook which besides looking nice has decent speakers. Or if you are feeling green after the PR party last night there is always the U Series Bamboo Collection. It is all bamboo, well other than the Intel Core i7 chip, which makes it recyclable and good for polar bears. Then there is also the Republic of Gamers G73Jh which is a high end laptop that seems to do more than my desktop, which is a little annoying. It comes with an Core i7 processor, Direct X 11-capable ATI Radeon HD5870 graphics, 8GB of DDR3 memory, 8-channel HD audio with EAX 4.0 compatibility and 1 terabyte of storage. You can overclock the thing to within an inch of its life and still get it confiscated for trying to take it into the US on a scheduled flight.

Either way the new notebooks look nice and even if netbooks and ultrathin PCs have made inroads into the market it looks like there will be a lot of notebooks still around. µ