Shop till you drop

MOBINNOVA éLAN RENAMED BEAM

Mobinnova's élan, or the Beam as it's reportedly known as now, is a curious beast. It runs Windows CE, yet it's packing NVIDIA's Tegra graphics technology. Thus, it's not really a netbook, but calling it a smartbook might be short-changing it. Whatever the case, a recent interview with Mobinnova's CTO Mark Anderson has unearthed plans to launch the machine at CES 2010 with an undisclosed mobile carrier (or more, maybe) in America. We're also told that it should last between five and ten hours...

DELL INSPIRON 11Z REVIEWED

Dell's 11.6-inch Inspiron 11z sure looks promising, with a sub-$500 price tag and an Intel Celeron 723 / non-Atom processor, but if you ask the gang at Notebook Review to describe it, it's unfortunately a pretty big letdown. Some minor issues with the body from the get-go, it's apparently got one of the worst touch pads the site's ever seen, and the 1.2GHz processor ended up underperforming compared to its Atom-based competition (although we gotta wonder how using Windows 7 instead of Vista...

SMARTBOOK AG FOLLOWS IN PSION’S FOOTSTEPS

Looks like smartbooks really are the new netbooks, after all. Aptly exemplifying déjà vu, German company Smartbook AG has issued a cease-and-desist to Netbooknews.de, claiming it owns the trademark and copyright on the term "smartbook" and that its use on the news site is damaging to the company's reputation and credibility. The letter demands that within two weeks all instances of the word be stricken from both the German and English-language versions, despite the latter being hosted in the...