Sony have launched a new laptop which includes a Blu-Ray drive. The small Sony monsters screen is 17″ and capable of 1,920 x 1,200 WUXGA+ on an XBrite Display. It includes 200Gb storage space, 2.0Ghz Duo Core processor and weighs just 8.4 pounds. The Blue-Ray drive is writeable at 1x speed which isnt exactly great, but this is the first in it’s class… so you cant really complain at that one! Unfortunatly the battery life is a mere 2 hours which isnt good at all. However, this laptop is a good step forwards and will open doors to others following.

Now this does look good and the price is not too shabby either. Samsung have made this uo core processer the smallest in the world as of the 13th June 2006. The laptop has a widescreen and also a 5 in 1 card reader which comes very handy for digital cameras and such.

The price of the device is less then £1000 which is a good price for something so small and portable.

The new Asus W3J core duo centrino laptop weighs in at just 4lbs and puts it’s self in the ultra portable catagory of laptops. The Asus has a 14 Inch screen, a core duo processor and boasts 1GB DDR2 RAM with an ATI mobility Radeon X1600. Bluetooth 2.0 is included and is made from a brushed metal type case. Sounds very swish!

Sony have released information on their new ultra portable Vaio range of laptops know as the TX3 series.

They will be priced around the $2000 price range, sport many goodies packed in like BlueTooth, Wifi, TV Tuner and more and all that packs in to just a 1 inch think case. Not bad!! Sony have always impressed me with how small they can make things.

The Laptop comes with an 11.1″ wide screen display which I assume will be the nice x-black type.

One other great piece of news is that the battery now lasts around 7.5 hours which in the past has been a downfall of Sony. 10 hours is excellent though and will cover some serious travel between charges.

Fuel Cells seem to be in the news more often these days. They are set to become the replacement for the laptop battery for 1 example. Currently they are bulky and a little too large to be convenient for laptop users… but no doubt in a years time they will shrink them in size and manage to get fuel cells in to the laptop instead of being a huge bolt on like the picture below. Some of the main brands around the world are building these trying to come up with the ideal power source. Tosiba (photo below), and Casio are both running in this game. Casio stated back in 2002 they wanted to use Fuel Cell technology to power laptops for around 20 hours at a time.

Instead of storing power, fuel cells generate electricity by breaking down methanol via an electrochemical process. In the Toshiba version there is a compartment to put the methanol cartridge in (looks like a printer cartridge) and this gives instant power at the push of a button. Great for long journeys… no charging is needed. Just fill up the cell and away you go. Toshiba say the cell will give around 10 hours of power to a laptop.

Toshiba already are in talks with companies to shrink down some of the components needed like the pump and other parts. They want to get this out with in the year to a more acceptable size and with the goal in mind of putting the fuel cell where the battery goes for ultimate portability.