notebooks

ASUS is showing itself to be a competent company at dealing with all the challenges facing traditional consumer tech manufacturers in the post-PC world. It’s released some great smartphones recently, and now it’s just released a fantastic laptop. The Chromebook Flip has won me over.

I’m sure you can imagine, as a tech-reviewer it’s not often I fall for a product just on first impressions alone. But as soon as I picked up the Chromebook Flip, I adored it. The all-metal build looks, and feels fantastic. Its rounded corners and the gentle taper of the back towards the diamond-cut chamfered edges are beautiful. On the bottom, all the edges and corners are rounded, giving it a really friendly look, and making it comfortable to grip.

What’s more, the speakers are hidden underneath two perfectly round grilles made of hundreds of tiny machined holes. But it’s the hinge that makes this unique. The screen rotates 360 degrees, and can be used in 4 different modes: laptop, tent, stand or tablet modes. Because the hinge is so firm, it holds strongly at virtually any angle.

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Chromebooks are only four years old as a computing category, but they’ve helped give a new lease on life to a flagging PC industry in this ‘Post PC’ world. They’re almost always inexpensive and low maintenance, thanks to being almost entirely browser based. But now, four years later, there are so many options on the market, it’s hard to know what to buy. Here’s our guide on the best Google-powered notebooks out there…

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Nvidia CEO Jen-hsun Huang doesn’t typically shy away from making bold claims regarding the future of the tech industry. Just yesterday Huang claimed gaming consoles would reach “tens of teraflops” (according to MacWorld approximately a trillion floating point operations a second) by 2019. He is also, however, making some predictions about the industry on the short term, claiming non-Apple tablets (Android) will see significant growth over the next year due to increased compatibility and improved performance between hardware and software.

According to DigiTimes, Huang, not so surprisingly, expects a new wave of Android tablets and ultrabooks to experience growth during 2012, while noting that hybrid devices like the Transformer Prime from Asus will also experience increased demand. He doesn’t, however, expect the choice between various tablets, ultrabooks, and notebooks to be a huge concern for consumers with each device having its own advantages and thus its own market.

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