Product Central

Fed up with plastic or magnesium alloy notebooks? How about a wooden one? That's what Fujitsu is showing at the 'Japan Design 2008 - Innovation' show, which runs from April 16 to 20 in Milan as part of of the Salone Internazionale del Mobile, an interior design trade show (the world's largest, it says here).



Pity the keyboard isn't wooden too, but the system does use environmentally friendly bio-based plastics, as seen in the slightly more conventional FMV-BIBLO NX95Y/D:



It may not be quite so green, but what we'd like is a perspex laptop honeycombed with tubes filled with a selection of transparent brightly coloured liquids that move around as the system heats up — a sort of Liquid Len-top, for those of a certain vintage. Oh dear, it must be nearly the weekend...

HP's much-rumoured 2133 Mini-Note PC is now official in the UK. This attempt to exploit the market tapped so successfully by the ASUS Eee will cost from £299 (ex. VAT) for a Linux-based configuration.



The 1.27kg Mini-Note has an 8.9in. display and a webcam, is powered by a VIA C7-M processor (not Intel's new Atom), and comes with either 1GB or 2GB of RAM, 802.11b/g or a/b/g Wi-Fi, Bluetooth (optional), a shock-protected 120GB hard disk (not an SSD), a 3-cell (2h 15m claimed life) or 6-cell (4h 30m claimed) Li-ion battery and runs Linux.

We'll post a full review of this ultramobile system just as soon as we can get our hot little hands on it.

Hot off the press from our Shanghai correspondent at IDF — a picture of Nehalem, Intel's next-generation processor:



Pressed into Rupert Goodwins' eager hands literally minutes ago, this chip represents the 'tock' part of Intel's 'tick-tock' development cycle, building a new and improved architecture on top of the 45nm fabrication process introduced last year with the Penryn chips.

Rupert's keyboard seems to bear a few battle scars too — more from our man at IDF later.