The Seashell has a 10in screen and is just 1in thick

Asus has launched a thin, low weight netbook in the UK dubbed the Eee PC 1008HA Seashell.

The Seashell has a 10in screen and is just 1in thick and weighs in at 2.4 pounds. Under the hood is an Intel Atom N280 processor running at 1.66GHz, 1GB of RAM and 170GB of hybrid storage, including a 160GB hard disk drive.

Connection options run through three flavours of 802.11, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3G and WiMax.

In order to increase its use as something more than a netbook, the Seashell offers a keyboard that is approximately 93 per cent of full size, and one-touch access to a list of most-used applications.
Read more …

Hands-on Having a small-capacity solid-state drive in your netbook may be limitation but it has one advantage: it’s easy to back up. We don’t mean copying a few files over to a safe place, but duplicating the entire drive, operating system and all, ready to drop it all back on if the worst comes to the worst.

PCs often come with recovery disks that you can use to place a fresh copy of the OS and pre-loaded apps back onto a freshly formatted drive. With some free, open source tools, you make one of your own, for your netbook. It’ll work whether you use Linux or Windows XP, and whether your machine has a hard disk or a solid-state drive.

We use PING – which stands for Partition Image Not Ghost, a reference to Norton Ghost, a commercial disk duplication app – but it requires an external CD drive to boot from. So we’ve also included details of a second tool, which you can install on a USB Flash drive.

PING comes from WindowsDream here (http://ping.windowsdream.com/cgi-bin/download.pl). Make sure you download the “community edition”, which is the free version. It’s a 22MB .iso file you burn to CD or DVD. Connect your optical drive to your netbook, put the disc and and start up the computer. You’ll need to access the machine’s boot menu, if it has one – ESC on an Eee PC; F12 on an Acer Aspire One, for instance – or enter the Bios setup screen and make sure your optical drive is at the top of the list of devices the computer can start up from.

PING loads up through a small Linux kernel. When it’s ready, it’ll tell you to press Enter to start. The screens that follow guide you through either backing up or restoring your system, but the process isn’t perhaps as clear as it might be, so we’ll walk you through it. PING also lets you back up to a network store, which we won’t cover here, but isn’t so very different from archiving your netbook on a USB hard drive or Flash stick.

Read more …

Just when we thought HP had moved on, what with the Mini 1000 getting all the love these days, HP has returned to its original Mini-Note 2100 series of netbooks with the 2140. Supposedly aimed at businesses, the new netbook loses that sluggish VIA C7-M of its predecessors and replaces it with — you guessed it — a 1.6GHz Atom processor. There’s also a 80GB or 160GB hard drive onboard and a 10-inch screen available in 1366 x 768 and 1024 x 567 resolutions, plus that lovable ExpressCard / 54 slot hasn’t gone anywhere, but the machine remains otherwise mostly unchanged.

Read more …

Read more …