Items tagged with Ultrabook
We love premium laptops and convertibles. A meticulously engineered build, finely-tuned performance, and solid battery life comprise the three primary tenets we look for when reviewing new machines. Checking these boxes does come at a cost, leaving many of our favorite laptops with hefty price tags. Unfortunately, most of us cannot justify dropping a stack of cash for the latest and greatest. Instead, mainstream consumers turn to the thriving midrange market. Here, manufacturer’s compete for our hard earned dollar with a wide range of solutions, each of which caters to a slightly different slice of end user usage models. When you cannot have it all, compromises must be made. In recent years,...
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Huawei is perhaps best known as the second largest smartphone manufacturer in the world. The Chinese company recently surpassed Apple's marketshare despite difficulties cracking the U.S. market. The company has enjoyed strong demand for their products internationally, thanks to competitive pricing and premium designs. We have previously reviewed Huawei's MateBook X Pro and Matebook D notebooks and found both to be solid values and worthy of recommendation. At CES this year, Huawei introduced its newest ultrabook, the Matebook 13. We took it for a spin to see how it compares to Huawei's other offerings, and the competition. The MateBook 13 comes standard with a Intel Core i5-8265U clocked...
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The ThinkPad line of notebooks has a long, storied history, from its beginnings as an IBM product, to Lenovo's continued refinements and improvements, generation over generation. ThinkPads are well known, often sought after products, especially by business-class road warriors, due to their no-nonsense design language, excellent keyboards, and reputation for reliability. In addition, ThinkPads have had one other thing remain consistent over the years -- a glorious little red nub, called a TrackPoint or pointing stick, that remains faithfully nestled between the G and H keys. For some it's a love it or hate it sort of feature but Lenovo has maintained it generation after generation, so it's...
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When Lenovo launched the Yoga 910, it was beautifully styled, powerful enough for most mobile users, and it offered reasonably good battery life. However, the public reception of the 2-in-1 convertible was a bit mixed and perhaps not quite what the company had hoped for. Some critics took issue with the Yoga 910's thermal characteristics, fan noise, and its awkwardly-placed upward-facing web cam. However, Lenovo took this feedback into consideration and developed the new Yoga 920 we'll be showing you here. From the outside, the Yoga 910 and 920 look similar at first glance, but there are a multitude of significant updates that improve the machine in a number of ways. Nestled inside an all-aluminum...
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We could have predicted that HP would refresh its laptop lineup after Intel introduced its 8th Generation Core processor family in mobile form (Kaby Lake Refresh, or Kaby Lake-R, not to be confused with Coffee Lake on the desktop). By extension, our crystal ball, if we had one, would have also told us the new lineup would be faster than the previous generation, especially in multi-threaded applications where upgrading from a dual-core 7th Generation CPU to a quad-core 8th Generation chip would pay the biggest dividends. But what we could not have foreseen is that subtle changes beyond swapping out the engine that drives its systems would add up to an appreciably superior experience. Spoiler—it...
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Anyone that has worked with laptops for a while might recall the ThinkPad brand from back in the day before Lenovo purchased the client PC division from IBM. One of the most notable things about the old-school ThinkPads was the keyboard, complete with a blue enter key and a red trackpoint nub smack dab in the center. After Lenovo took over the ThinkPad line, some of the beloved industrial styling cues from those workhorse machines left along with the IBM logo. However, Lenovo is now celebrating the 25th anniversary of the ThinkPad brand with a unique ThinkPad 25 Anniversary Edition notebook that combines some aspects of IBM's retro-style circa 1992 with the features and performance...
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Dell has not done much to tweak the physical design of its XPS 13 laptop over the past couple years, though it's not out of laziness or complacency. The past few models have exemplified excellence in engineering, with the size and weight of the XPS 13 belying what lays in wait when you crack open the lid. Its InfinityEdge display all but eliminates bezel and delivers a larger-than-expected viewing area based on the laptop's overall dimensions, and the hardware powering it has, for the most part, been cutting edge. In keeping with that latter theme, Dell upgraded its XPS 13 for late 2017 with a new 8th generation Intel Core i7 processor, specifically the Core i7-8550U, effectively doubling the...
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The slim, sleek Razer Blade gaming laptop we'll be looking at here is an interesting beast that does its best to perform a balancing act of sorts. The gaming laptop arena is a landscape full of compromises. Gamers generally crave the most powerful technologies on the market, but until we can cram 8K displays into a fanless 13-inch form factor with dual Titan X GPUs and physics-defying thermal headroom, sacrifices obviously must be made. And we love high-end, 10 pound gaming battle stations, don't get us wrong, but sometimes situations and use cases call for something actually portable. Now, there are a plethora of gaming notebooks to rival even the best desktops, though many...
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Lenovo has carved out quite a business for itself in the laptop space over the years, led more recently by premium machines like the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon. However, there are obviously many more models in the ThinkPad family of products, beyond just the top-shelf X1 Carbon line. In the more affordable ThinkPad T470s (starting price of $959), you will find a thin, light ultrabook with many of the features Lenovo is known for, including the usual fantastic keyboard setup and solid performance. At just 2.9 pounds, you’d be forgiven for thinking it doesn’t pack much punch, but this Kaby Lake powered ultrabook can get the job done. The T470s is available with a 14-inch 1920x1080 (HD) screen...
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Lately, Dell has been able to deliver notebooks that bring a smile to our faces, especially when a new XPS laptop slides across our desk. It hasn't always been that way, but since revamping the XPS line, starting with the XPS 13 back in 2015, Dell’s premium laptops have been leaders in the ultrabook market, especially in the 15 and 13-inch formats. The XPS 13 and its new 2-in-1 variant make great and highly portable workstations to tote around, but their smaller frames and relative horsepower may not be for everybody. That’s where the crossover to a 15-inch machine might make for a worthy trade-off. For a little more heft, the XPS 15 of yesteryear boasted a discrete GTX 960M onboard with...
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At Microsoft's WinHEC 2016 conference, which took place in December in Shenzhen, the company outlined suggestions of what the hottest devices in 2017 should include. The company has finally made its presentation public, so we can get a feel for what's coming this year. Admittedly, not much should be a surprise, but it's good to see it laid out neatly. At the forefront, Microsoft wants to see a focus on cutting-edge designs, which includes ultraportables and convertibles. At the same time, vendors need to figure out how to make these same designs pack in as much functionality as possible, which ultimately takes a lot of real-estate on our ever-shrinking devices. Under "Cool Designs", Microsoft...
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Acer has consistently expanded and refined its mobile product offerings, to include everything from affordable mainstream notebooks, to sleek ultrabooks that use premium materials. The veteran PC maker has developed a sense of style and is putting real effort into creating thin, functional laptops, that also happen to look good. The Swift 7 is one of the thinnest laptops on the market, and it has some interesting hardware squeezed inside, too. But going ultra-thin often results with performance or functionality compromises, so we were taken aback that Acer dubbed its thinnest laptop “Swift.” We brought one in to see just how fast (and how fun) this Kaby Lake-powered laptop really is. Acer’s Swift...
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Acer's bringing sexy back to the laptop landscape with its previously announced Swift 7, a svelte system billed as the world's thinnest with a waistline that measures a mere 0.39 inches. It's also staggeringly light at just 2.48 pounds, and if you've been waiting for this beauty to show up, we have good news—the Swift 7 is now available to order in the U.S. starting at $1,099.The Swift 7 owes its ultra-thin and featherweight status to its aluminum unibody design. Acer didn't stop there, though, giving the Swift 7 a fantastic looking gold inner surface that contrasts nicely with its matte black exterior, at least from what we can tell from the press photos (we've yet to spy one of these systems...
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Although they were initially announced all the way back at Computex, ASUS held a casual event in NYC this past Wednesday (Oct. 5) to officially launch an array of new products, including the ZenBook 3, ZenWatch 3, ZenPhone 3, and Transformer Pro 3 and Mini. We’ve got some initial coverage of all of those products here at HotHardware if you’d like some additional background on the full line-up, including hands-on video of the latest ZenBook and smartwatch. However, we couldn’t wait to dive in a little deeper with the ZenBook 3 for a couple of reasons. First off, the ZenBook 3 is the first Ultrabook to hit the lab built around Intel’s brand-new Kaby Lake-based 7th Generation Core series processors....
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