GIGABYTE M912 Cafe Book Convertible Tablet
Similar to the Asus Eee PC T91 described above, the GIGABYTE M912 is one of the first convertible tablet-style netbooks available on the market. GIGABYTE is having a hard time keeping up with demand and for good reason: this little computing wizard is a great travel companion for those who want the utility of a tablet but without the added bulk or increased cost.
The 8.9-inch swivel touchscreen gets backed up with an Intel Atom N270 (1.6GHz) processor, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, a 2.5″ SATA hard drive with 160GB of storage, Mobile Intel 945GSE Express chipset, Windows XP Home, 1.3 megapixel webcam, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, and 802.11b/g Wi-Fi. For people who want a little more beef in their Cafe Book, GIGABYTE has configured the M912 in such a way that the memory and hard drive are easily upgraded. It’s modular.
Lenovo W700ds Dual-Monitor Monster Laptop
If you want to talk about a real game-changer, then you should definitely take a closer look at Lenovo’s new W700ds dual-screen laptop computer. This is a huge contrast from the netbooks and tablets described in the rest of this article, because portability is nowhere near being one of its strong points. I hope you have a good bag and a strong shoulder, because this thing tips the scales at a whopping eleven pounds.
In this way, the Lenovo W700ds is designed to be a desktop replacement. The biggest selling point, of course, is its secondary display. The primary screen already offers 17-inches of real estate, but you can also pop up a secondary display out the right side that measures 10.6-inches. This second display is oriented in portrait mode, making it great for instant messengers and other secondary applications.
Better still, after you pop out the spring-loaded secondary display, you can tilt it toward you, just as you would with a dual LCD configuration on your desktop.
As a mobile workstation, the specs on the Lenovo W700ds certainly aren’t anything to sneeze at. Prices start in the $3,600 range, getting you up to a quad-core processor, Nvidia Quadro graphics, up to 8GB of DDR3 memory, dual hard drives or solid state drives for up to 960GB of storage, an integrated Wacom digitizer, dual heat reduction systems, and biometric security.