best laptop Acer TimelineX 1830T landing this June for €549

Acer has finally revealed pricing for the Acer TimelineX 1830T and its band of siblings. According to the company's German branch, the 13.3-inch 1830T will drop sometime this June and should cost €549 (around $731), the 13.3-inch 3820T will be €699 ($931), while the 14-inch 4820T and 15.6-inch 5820T will kick off at €749 ($997). The company didn't mention a release timeframe for other three systems.

Acer has also provided some specs for the 1830T, which mostly just confirm what we've known since last month. It's outfitted with an LED-backlit 1,366x768 display, Intel's Core ix processors, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, a 640GB HDD, 802.11n Wi-Fi, gigabit LAN, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, a webcam, a 5-in-1 card reader, three USB 2.0 ports, HDMI and VGA-out, and Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit.

Exact specifications for the other TimelineX models aren't yet known, but they will also be powered by Intel's Core i3, i5 and i7 CPUs.
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custom windows - HP dumping Windows 7 from its Slate tablet computer

With this week's news that HP is buying Palm and their webOS mobile operating system, rumors are hot that the Windows 7 HP Slate tablet is being canceled, to be replaced by a webOS powered model.

Windows 7 is a desktop OS, not a mobile OS

When Microsoft's Steve Ballmer demoed a Slate at a trade show earlier this year, both HP and Microsoft's stock fell the next day. The demo obviously didn't go that well, and anyone who's tried to run a Microsoft OS on a underpowered computer can understand why Windows 7 isn't well-suited for a resource-constrained device.

According to technology pundit, Michael Arrington, "HP is not satisfied with Windows 7 as a tablet operating system." Since Windows Phone 7 isn't production-ready and now HP owns their own highly-regarded (if not high-selling) mobile OS, it makes sense for the company to use webOS on a new version of the Slate.

Attracting developers to the webOS Slate

The key to HP's success with the Slate is attracting programming talent to develop apps for the device, especially since they've lost the entire library of Windows programs.

This will be a difficult battle for HP, since they are competing with Apple's iPhone OS and Google's Android, both with robust app markets. Windows Phone 7 also has an established community of .NET developers working on apps for that OS.