Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

With a recent shoulder injury, the 20 lb Dell XPS (with battery and power supply) appears to be heavier than normal. It's interesting that the laptop sizes are going to the two extremes, the powerful ones are evolving from 13 inch to 14 inch to 17 inch to 20.1 inch (Dell XPS M2010)! On the other hand, the manufacturers are also making the laptops to the mini end: 12 inch to 11 inch to 10 inch to 6 inch (the world smallest laptop – Sony VAIO UX)!

Among all of the mini laptops, the 10 inch laptops seem to be the most “popular” and “mature” laptop products. Sony and Fujitsu were the first two companies that started the mini laptop series. But other laptop producers like Acer, Lenovo (IBM) and Apple immediately jump onto the mini laptop wagon.

This obviously is driven by the consumers. There are people like me looking for more powerful desktop replacement laptops, but there are people like my co-workers (whom owns the first generation of mini laptops – SONY VGN-UX) refuses to carry around heavy laptops. It seems more people I know are looking for the smaller solution at the moment, here I find a few models for their selections.

1. The newer version of my co-worker's Sony mini laptop is Sony VAIO VGN-T350P/L. The entire laptop weight only 3.04 lb, it uses Intel M 1.2GHz, 2MB cache memory, 512MB DDR SDRAM, 60 GB 4200 RPM hard drive, 10.6 WXGA LCD display, 10/100M wireless network card and an INTERNAL DVD Recorder! The VGN-T350P/L battery supports up to 9 hours of operation! Wow, my XPS battery only supports up to 2.5 hours and a risk of explosion! :) The advantage of this mini laptop is it's from a reliable series, my co-worker whom own the fist generation of Sony mini laptop has been using it for 3 years and barely had any problems.

2.Fujitsu LifeBook P7230 (FPCM21122) has a nice look, the cool colored titanium skin make it attractive to young people and female laptop consumers. This laptop weight only 2.55 lb! Here is the default configuration with the mini laptop: Intel ULV Core Solo U1400 CPU (1.2GHz，Intel 945GMS chip set)，1024MB DDR2 RAM，80GB hard drive，build-in DVD/CDRW，10.6 inch LCD. What's special about this laptop is it comes with 2 batteries by default and 2 USB 2.0 ports and 1 fire wire port, a multi-card reader, and a wireless network card. Pretty much everything you will need when you are on the road. The advantage of this laptop is it's light weight and more memory)

3.Another one I really like is Averatec 1050-EB1 (AV1050EB1) , it is a Korean brand. The only wide screen mini laptop in the market I think. Weight 3.6 lb. Very slick design, dark red (wine color) skin and milk white keyboard makes it really attractive to the fashion seekers. The set-up of this computer is: Intel 1.1GHz M ULV 733 CPU (855GME chip set)，512MB DDR RAM，10.6 inch WXGA LCD (a very bright wide screen mini laptop with brightness of 240cd/m2)，80GB hard drive，and an internal DVD/CD -RW Drive. It also got both USB and Fire Wire ports, also D-SUB, Type II PC card slot, MMC/SD/MS/MS Pro multi card reader and built-in 802.11b/g wireless card. The advantage of this mini-laptop is it's crystal clear wide screen LCD display.

These are the top three mini laptops in the market today. However the mini laptops are often expensive and when you put all the processing power into a compact package, you can expect things may go wrong soon or later. So, choose wisely and carefully.