News Bits: Asus Lambo Launch for U.S., Turion X2 Demand Grows, Wait Times for Dell Battery Replacements, Core 2 Duo in VAIOs

Asus to announce availability of Lamborghini notebook

Asus will announce availability of the Asus Lamborghini VX1 notebook in the United States at the 2006 Concorso Italiano "Celebration of Italian Style" on August 18. The VX1 will be the first of a series of officially licensed products as a result of the partnership between Asus, Automobili Lamborhini, and Intel.

The VX1 has a special mirrored finish, suggestive of Lamborghini's automobiles, and was designed from the beginning to be in a class by itself. CEO and President of Automobili Lamborghini, Stephan Winkelmann, made a statement:

"The ASUS-Lamborghini VX1 backs up its Lamborghini- inspired design with top performance, unbeatable features, and rock-solid ASUS quality. It is a stunning notebook worthy of the Lamborghini name."

The Asus Lamborghini VX1 will have the following specifications:

VX1-5E003P

• LCD 15" SXGA (1400x x 1050) with Color Shine technology
• Graphics NVIDIA GeForceGo 7400VX Special Edition / 512MB Turbocache(TM)
• CPU Intel(R) Core(R) Duo T2500, 2.0 GHz
• Memory 2GB DDRII 667 MHz
• Optical Drive 4X DVD Super Multi
• Battery 8 cell
• HDD 160GB, 5400 RPM
• OS Windows(R) XP(R) Professional
• Wireless/ Bluetooth Bluetooth 2.0; 802.11 a/b/g
• Bag & Mouse Yes
• Colors Available Yellow and black

Read more here, and discuss it in the forums here.

Demand for AMD Turion 64 X2 growing fast

The demand for AMD's Turion 64 X2 processor is growing fast in the Taiwan market, and AMD expects the dual-core CPUs to be implemented in over 50% of Turion-based notebooks by the end of 2006.

Due to the dual-core platform becoming mainstream, AMD predicts that the Turion 64 X2 will replace the previous Turion 64 single-core faster than expected. General manager of the personal systems group at HP Taiwan, Dennis Chen, said that after HP's July launch of Turion-64 X2 powered HP notebooks, demand for dual-core notebooks went up, and now make up 60-70% of the company's sales of AMD-based notebooks in Taiwan.

Acer said it will be launching two new models based off the Turion X2 soon in Taiwan, and it will also be used in their Ferrari notebook series.

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75-day deliver time for some recalled Dell batteries

Earlier this week, Dell recalled 4.1 million notebook batteries. Dell's estimated time for delivery of a new battery was up to 20 business days. However, some batteries, models M3006 and H3191 have extended lead times, and can take up to 75 business days for delivery - that leaves users without a battery for four months.

Affected models include the Inspiron 9100 and XPS series. Please visit DellBatteryProgram.com if you have a notebook with a battery that needs replacement.

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Core 2 Duo showing up in Sony notebooks

Users in our Sony forum have spotted several Sony notebooks showing up for preorder featuring an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. One example can be found here. The Sony SZ does not appear to be getting any further upgrades besides the processor itself.

Discuss it in the forums here.

Hitach to introduce 1TB desktop hard drives

Hitachi is working on producing a 1 terabyte hard drive by the end of the year. Seagate currently has the largest 3.5" drive at 750GB. Hitachi's president of product strategy said that the 1TB drive will be put into home computers and servers this year.

1TB hard drives isn't the only item on the horizon with large storage capacities. Hitachi-Maxell is slated to launch a new line of holographic media later this year. Discs will start at around 300GB in capacity, and scale to 1.6TB by 2010.

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Other non-Dell notebooks could also have bad batteries

The US Consumer Product Safety Commission is investigating other makes of laptops which use Sony lithium-ion batteries to see if they also pose a fire risk.

In addition to Dell, Sony also supplies batteries to other manufacturers, such as Apple, HP, and Lenovo to name a few.

Dell is expecting no financial damage from the recall, because supposedly Sony will be taking care of the bill. Consumers will be getting free replacement batteries.

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I wonder who would need a 1 Terabyte HDD in their home computer. I think that's a little over the top. It makes sense to put them in servers, but it is a bit over the top for the average home computer.

 

I imagine someone said the same thing once upon a time about people needing a 1 GB HDD. This is ancient history but I remember having a desktop back in the early 90's that had a 286 processor and had a hard drive that held 40MB. That was all it had. At that time, 1 GB even sounded like a lot. Now laptops are coming standard with at least 40 GB. I imagine in 10 years or so that we will have computers with 40 TB.

 

I'm a bit dissappointed with the Lambo laptop. I would rather have seen a 7200RPM HD and a faster CPU (2.16 or 2.33ghz) more color options would be nice to (orange and lime green) I plan on building just such a machine based on a Sager 5760. Hopefully they will do another machine in the future (17in!) with more power.

Availibility is definetly limited which makes sense actually (newegg has them till end of august then some retailers-price $2800