nkedel

For those waiting on laptops with these (business models especially):

Dell has started taking orders on their mainstream business line models (14-15" Latitude E5520/E6520/E5420/E5420) sometime in the last 48 hours and had orders up for the larger of the two thin-and-light models (E6320 13"; no sign of the 12" E6220) yet. Pricing looks decent, and both the E6420 and E6520 have a quad-core option. Orders should start shipping first week of

No public word out of Lenovo yet, but I'd expect to see something from them really soon.

chx1975

No word from Lenovo? At least the T420, T420s, T520, X220 uses Sandy Bridge.

Samsung have announced a number of interesting laptops, the Series 2, 4, 6 and 9.

srirams

x220 seems to be the best for me. Can't live without the trackpoint, and seems to give amazing battery life. Only wish it would have a smaller bezel and maybe a bit lighter. I can hope for a x220s

chx1975

If you look closely at the Samsung announcements yesterday there is a blue trackpoint in there, no doubt http://www.laptopspec.net/wp-content...g-Series-4.jpg

maize&blue

Samsung 9 series laptop looks amazing, but the price is at least a couple hundred dollars too high. The intent is clearly to go head-to-head against Macbook Air, but Samsung won't win many converts if they keep pricing above Apple's prices.

chx1975

That's the Series 9 but there is also Series 2, 4 and 6 and the 6 promised decent screen resolution but there is nothing more than a PR about that -- no weight, no picture, no price. If anyone has that'd be great I am keeping my eyes peeled for the Lenovo T420s but the Series 6 made me think.

srirams

That's a pleasant surprise. Looks like it will be a worthy competitor to the x220.

chx1975

Note that Dell calls that a Trackstick and hides it under "Single pointing or Dual Pointing Keyboard: Standard or Backlit" -- Dual Pointing Keyboard means you get a trackpoint. They do not advertise it much but the option is there.

nkedel

Unless something has come up in the past 48 hours, all just "coming soon" without public announcement of pricing or ship dates. For that matter, exact configurations are somewhat hazy, for example: http://shop.lenovo.com/us/products/p...220/index.html

Beckles

I've been anxiously awaiting buying a new T420, and the T420 and T520 are available for order now with shipping within 8 days, see this page.

What I'm trying to figure out is how the Rapid Drive is supposed to work on these. Some articles I've read indicate Rapid Drive involves a separate 8 gig SSD, which I interpreted to mean you don't have to buy the expensive SSD as your main drive, but I don't see anything at all about it when configuring a machine ...

adambadam

The option where you have a SSD and a HDD has the OS and other system files and programs on the SSD for fast start time and then user data on the HDD so you don't run out of expensive storage.

maize&blue

Sony's rumored Hybrid PC sounds mighty interesting:

[from engadget]
we're looking at a thin-and-light Core i7 notebook with an incredible 8 to 16.5 hours of battery life, Intel Thunderbolt and an internal SSD, all of which plugs into a dock of some sort that adds a Blu-ray burner and external graphics (by AMD) for gaming and multimedia. We don't have any pictures or proof at this point, but it sounds like a whopper of a tale, and just the sort of thing that Intel was talking about making possible with the 10Gbps of bandwidth that Thunderbolt brings.

srirams

I almost forgot... the x220 has the option for an IPS screen, which is another option that many have been clamoring for.

nkedel

Nice. That seems to be new in the past couple of days. Given that my employer is primarily on Lenovo, this will definitely get some more attention from colleagues on Monday...

Although, interestingly, they are not offering a quad-core option on either the T420 or T520 (presumably will on the W520, which is still "coming soon", and I'd seen elsewhere it should be available at some point on the T520 at least) - that will not make some people happy, and misses one of the biggest benefit (IMO) of the Sandy Bridge models over the Nehalem/Westmere ones (indeed, the quad cores mobile Nehalems never got the die-shrink treatment.)

I'm planning on sticking with Dell; the E6420 is not as nice in some ways as the T420, but looks like it will meets my needs better.

It'll likely be added as an option after launch. Probably bigger than an 8GB SSD, though:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/20/l...es-66-percent/

Interestingly, Intel has their own SSD-caching technology coming on the newer iteration of the desktop chipset for Sandy Bridge.

I believe the intent is more sophisticated than that, with a full copy of both programs and data on the conventional drive, and copies of frequently-used information (potentially either OS/programs OR data) being made on the SSD. See the discussion of Intel's version here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...hing,2888.html

US web page still shows "coming in April." Are they taking orders already through some other channel?

nkedel

All of the mainstream (non-subnotebook) Dell/Lenovo models seem to be on-sale now, including the pricey but very attractively small Thinkpad T420s, and the somewhat less interesting (but cheaper) Dell E6320. The 12"/12.5" subnotebook models (E6220 from Dell, X220 from Lenovo) are still "coming soon."

We haven't gotten our first T-series Lenovos in to play with, but my personal E6420 arrived Thursday and I'm pretty impressed. The fastest laptop I've ever used, by quite a long shot and while there's a little added bulk over the E6410, it feels sturdy. Compared to the closest last generation machines I've used (Thinkpad W510 and Dell Precision M4500) having that kind of power in a 14" form factor is a huge improvement (and the sandy bridge quad-core is cooler, faster, and all-around-better than the 1st-generation Nehalems in the mobile quads from late 2009; for a high-performance machine it runs REALLY cool and it is dead silent at idle and doing light browsing.)

On the other hand, it's also a lot bigger than the T410s, so unless there's something seriously wrong with the T420s, that's probably going to be a better call for serious road warriors not needing a quad-core CPU will probably want to stick with Lenovo. I am not sure why Lenovo didn't decided to offer a quad-core option on the non-s T420.

A few minor quibbles:
- keyboard redesign is sort of halfway between regular and chiclet. I don't think it'll entirely please fans of either. It's OK, but as a chiclet-hater, I'd say it's a step backwards. It still has a pretty good degree of sculptedness to the key surface for touch typing; there are a few other redesign points, like moving the pgup/pgdown to the dead spaces around the up arrow rather than the top corner, which will take some getting used to.
- No ambient lighting sensor. Turning on the keyboard backlight is manual now, as is controlling the screen brightness.
- Bay devices are no longer compatible with the E6x00/E6x10, ditto batteries. Not super for inventory or for folks upgrading. Docks and power cords remain compatible.
- Access to the bottom for maintenance is now 5 screws rather than the prior (and very nice) single-screw access panel.

A few other minor improvements:
- the incredibly bright blue lights for power/battery/wlan/etc on the E6x00/E6x10 are much more muted white now.
- I didn't expect to like the shift to the 1600x900 14.0" screen from the 1440x900 14.1, but I'm liking it a lot more than I expected.
- No more dust trap grills over the speakers to either side of the keyboard (although it's not clear how they sound yet for music/movies; I'm barely a day into the reinstall.)
- The rather confusing array of security drivers/crapware/etc that Dell required has been further consolidated (it already improved some from the E6x00 to the E6x10.)