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Apple prepping Yerba Buena Center for Tuesday's event
Photo courtesy of David Jones, @d_jones San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, a longtime venue for Apple product introductions, is having window banners installed in preparation for the upcoming product announcement event scheduled for October 22. In case you're wondering what the building will look like when the crew is done, David Jones provided us with a photo of the layout (detail of original photo): In other news about the event, a source revealed to TUAW that Mac announcements are definitely on the agenda for Tuesday. Our take? Apple will at least announce the ship date for the Mac Pro, we'll probably see a speed and capability bump in the Retina MacBook Pro line, and -- we're going out on a limb here -- perhaps a 4K Cinema Display will be on tap. Be sure to join TUAW on Tuesday for our metaliveblog of the Apple event, followed on Tuesday afternoon by a special edition of TUAW TV Live.
Acer unveils $450 Iconia Tab A700: 1920 x 1200 display and Tegra 3 under the hood
With new laptop announcements coming practically every other day as of late, a tablet unveiling is a nice change of pace. We have Acer to thank for that, as it's lifting the curtain on the 10-inch Iconia Tab A700. As you might recall, we first saw this slate at CES, where we got some quality hands-on time. Like the earlier Iconia Tab A510, this slate has an NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor and runs Android 4.0, but it's the first Acer tablet with a 1920 x 1200 resolution. The A700 also features Dolby Mobile 3+ technology and 5.1-channel surround sound, and there's an HDMI port for watching locally stored video on a bigger screen. The 32GB version of the Iconia Tab A700 will cost $450, and it's up for pre-sale starting today. %Gallery-156747%
Fujitsu outs new Lifebook laptops and an Ivy Bridge-packing Ultrabook
Fujitsu started announcing its new summer lineup yesterday, unveiling two new Lifebook LH series laptops with Ivy Bridge under the hood. The company is back today with more Intel third-gen goodness and a new super-light notebook, all of which will start shipping in Japan on May 17th. Up first is the Lifebook UH75H, which we glimpsed at CeBIT back in March, and Fujitsu has wasted no time in giving it the "world's thinnest Ultrabook" distinction. The UH75H has a 14-inch display, measures a super-thin 15.6mm at its thickest point and weighs 3.2 pounds (1.44 kg). Its little brother, the UH55H, packs a smaller 13.3-inch screen, and both will be available in red or silver. There's also a new ultraportable, the Lifebook SH76H, which weighs just 1.34 kg (2.95 pounds) and is 16.6mm at its thinnest, though that sleek profile doesn't prevent it from offering an integrated optical drive. Fujitsu says this Lifebook will last almost 14 hours on a charge, about an hour longer than previous models. Like all SH machines, the SH76H has a 128GB SSD. Next on the announcement agenda are three new media-centric all-in-ones from the ESPRIMO FH family: the FH56, FH77HD and FH98M. All include a new "Quick TV" feature for launching the built-in TV viewer with the press of a button. Finally, there's the new 15.6-inch Lifebook AH78HA, the first notebook to include "nanoe" air purification for minimizing "fungi, smells, mold and allergens." That's making some pretty big assumptions about the cleanliness of your living space, but can't hurt, right? To accompany those new systems, Fujitsu is offering a new "My Cloud" feature that works with the company's FlashAir SD cards to wirelessly transfer media from a camera to a PC. My Cloud will also incorporate voice recognition to organize albums in My Photo Museum. Get all that? Good. Check out the presser below the break for the full lowdown.
HP refreshes EliteBook line with five new models, Ivy Bridge and optional LTE
HP is in full-on laptop-unveiling mode, and the company's business line isn't getting left out -- in fact, it has five new models -- including an 11-incher, a first for this series. The boardroom-bound EliteBooks are making the step up to Ivy Bridge, but it's also adding the option of LTE across the board. All models will ship with SRS Premium Sounds PRO and an optional 720p webcam. We have a complete breakdown of the models past the break, and you can find hands-on shots, along with the official press release below.
HP unveils second business Ultrabook, the EliteBook Folio
We actually have one more EliteBook to introduce, and this time it's an Ultrabook. The EliteBook Folio 9470m is ready to sidle up next to the Folio 13, HP's first business-grade Ultrabook, as a higher-end option. The 14-inch Folio is thin and light, starting at 3.6 pounds, but the 0.75-inch chassis makes room for an impressive collection of ports, including USB 3.0, Ethernet, DisplayPort and VGA. Since this Ivy Bridge laptop is balancing its Ultrabook identity with a business classification, it features an embedded TPM security chip, a smart card reader, security lock slot, full volume encryption and a security screw. Pricing starts at $1,149, and HP will begin shipping in October. Skip past the break for the presser, and check out our hands-on gallery below.
Tinfoil Hat Patrol: Why weren't the new iPhones announced at Macworld
Let's face it. Macworld Expo 2008 didn't exactly blow people away with its product intros. There was the MacBook Air, Apple TV Take Two and...um...not much else. And there could have been. Think about it. The Mac Pro was quietly upgraded in the days that led up to the event (psst, hey you, interested in some raw computing power?), and now the iPhone and iPod touch have received some major memory upgrades in the February slump. Both upgrades, as we have now seen, were relegated to Tuesday-morning sticky notes. It's not as if Apple couldn't have announced this morning's memory upgrades in January. I'm pretty sure these new iPods and iPhones didn't just magically spring into existence within the last 3 weeks. The product that was announced, the (*yawn*) major AppleTV upgrade with movie rentals. is already delayed, and no sign yet of the "late February" iPhone SDK. So what's going on with Apple? Is there some sort of mojo shortage? Or maybe Steve just wanted some of us to do badly in our keynote predictions[1]. You tell us in the comments. [1] See "tinfoil hat"
