ENVY, HP’s family of thin and light notebooks just grew by five members. HP just announced the ENVY Spectre XT, ENVY Sleekbook 14 and 15.6-inch and the ENVY Ultrabook 14 and 15.6-inch models.

Priced at $999, the ENVY Spectre XT comes with a 13.3-inch 1366 x 768 resolution display, third generation Intel Core (Ivy Bridge) processor, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD, USB 3.0, HDMI, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, backlit keyboard, Beats Audio with quad speakers, eight hours battery life, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit with two-year subscription to Norton Internet Security, full versions of Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Elements 10. It will go on sale on June 8. Read more »

Sony has officially announced their first Ultrabooks, the VAIO T11 and T13. As you can guess, the former has a 11-inch display and the latter a 13-inch display.

Both Ultrabooks will feature a sleek magnesium and aluminum body that will be 17.8mm thick. You get a full set of ports, including Ethernet, VGA, HDMI, 1 x USB 2.0, 1 x USB 3.0 and also an SD card slot. It has the traditional VAIO chicklet keyboard and a MacBook style trackpad that will hopefully will be similarly good. Read more »

After being rumored for the better part of the last year, Google officially just announced its own cloud storage solution – Drive.

Google Drive gives you 5GB of storage the second you sign in to use the service. No questions asked. The interface is based on Google Docs and you can collaborate with other people on documents, spreadsheets and presentations. The sharing and collaboration system is enhanced by comments, which you get notified for if they are new. Read more »

The countdown to the Windows 8 launch is slowly ticking (although we are not sure which date it is ticking down to) but while we wait for the final version to go on sale Microsoft is going to keep us busy with another beta version of the desktop OS.

Microsoft announced at the Windows 8 Developer Days conference that the Windows 8 Release Preview (previously known as Release Candidate) will be released in the first week of June. There was no further mention about the exact date or what changes this new version might bring. Read more »

Rumors about Google’s own cloud file sharing service dubbed Drive have been roaming the Internet for quite a while now. There are strong indications the launch is imminent and, now we hear it will be happening as early as next week.

The guys from TechCrunch got their hands on the Google Drive app for Mac OS X, proving the search giant’s intention of launching its newest service in the nearest future. Read more »

Microsoft has released the list of editions that Windows 8 will be sold in. As of now, there will be four editions, Windows 8, Windows 8 Pro, Windows 8 Enterprise and Windows RT.

The first three will be available for PCs and tablet users running x86/64 processors and will be on sale whereas Windows RT will be exclusively for PCs and tablets running on the ARM platform and will not be sold but would rather ship built into the devices. According to Microsoft, all editions of Windows 8 offer a no-compromise experience, which has sort of become their slogan with Windows 8. Read more »

We are about six months away from seeing the first Windows 8 tablets and personal computers hit the shelves now. Sources close to the matter were quoted by Bloomberg as saying that the next edition of the Windows 8 platform development will be complete by this summer and the first devices carrying it will hit the market in October.

Microsoft’s goal is to ship the x86 and the ARM versions of Windows 8 simultaneously and the company already confirmed there will be devices running both at launch day. Read more »

PC manufacturers can’t wait for Windows 8 to come out and they’ll be competing to be the first to offer a tablet running Microsoft’s new OS. Rumor has it that Lenovo will try to launch a W8 tablet as soon as the OS hits the shelves.

But they’ll have competition – Dell’s head honcho has already said “We’ll be there right on the very first day that Windows 8 is available”. Read more »

Prepare to act surprised. The Nokia head designer Marko Ahtisaari reportedly confirmed that his company is working on a tablet. What’s more, Mr. Ahtisaari says that he has dedicated no less than a third of his working time to the project in order to make the device stand out in the crowd.

Reuters reports that Nokia still hasn’t joined the tablet party due to the company’s wish to offer a product that’s easy to differentiate. Read more »

Google revealed they are busy at work to create a Metro version of their popular desktop browser Chrome for Windows 8. Microsoft’s new OS is a strange beast with two different environments – Windows 7-style desktop and the new Metro interface – which will run separate apps.

While the current browser will work just fine in desktop mode, it won’t be accessible in Metro, which is the preferred UI for tablets. Google is specifically looking to improve touch support for the Chrome on Metro. Read more »

Asus announced two new ultrabooks powered by Intel’s oft-delayed Ivy Bridge processor. There are 11.6″ and a 13.3″ versions – Asus Zenbook UX21A and UX31A respectively. Either size will have a FullHD IPS screen – yep, that’s 1920×1080 resolution on a 11.6″ screen.

The IPS screens will offer 350 nits of brightness, but if they are too pricy for you, you can switch to a vanilla LCD screen instead. That drops the brightness to 300 nits and the resolution is downgraded to 1600×900 for the 13.3″ model and 1366×768 for the 11.6″ one. Read more »

We’ve heard so many rumors of Nokia jumping on the tablet bandwagon that we are not sure what to believe anymore, but this latest bit sound rather plausible. The Finns are reportedly working on a 10″ slate running Windows 8, which should arrive to the market by the end of the year.

The Nokia tablet will be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 chipset, featuring a couple of Krait CPU cores. The production of the device itself will be outsourced to the Taiwanese company Compal Electronics and initial volumes are said to be the rather modest 200,000 units. Read more »

We’ve already had a peek at the Metro-styled Office 15 running on ARM, but since Microsoft is testing the Technical Preview of their highly popular office productivity suite, we can have a closer look at the desktop version of the apps.

Word, Excel and the rest have gotten touch friendly and with many new features to simplify editing and reading documents. Read more »

CeBIT is underway and Acer just unveiled a new ultrabook – the Aspire Timeline Ultra M3 – along with three laptops for non-ultra users – the Aspire V3 Series. The M3 is a 15″ ultrabook and features an un-ultrabookish DVD drive. The V3 Series on the other hand come in 14″, 15.6″ and 17.3″.

The Timeline Ultra M3 measures just 20mm thick (not bad for 15″) and is made of an aluminum alloy. In the fairly thin package you get enough room for a HDD+SSD combo. You can go SSD-only if you want. Read more »

I don’t know about you guys but when I saw Metro UI for the first time on a desktop PC, the first word that came to my mind started with ‘W’ and ended with ‘TF’. Sure, Metro is a beautiful user interface but when put on a 22-inch monitor it looks terribly out of place and doesn’t feel right when operated with a mouse. It looks even worse when placed alongside the old Windows 7/Vista UI, which will also be part of Windows 8. I wished Microsoft had come up with a way to make the existing Windows 7/Vista UI look more like Metro instead of having them simultaneously in one OS.

Unfortunately, my wish was left unfulfilled by Windows 8. But there is a designer out there who took almost exactly what I had in mind and made a mockup out of it. This, according to me and that designer, is how Windows 8 should have looked like. Read more »