Toshiba's new Radius 12 hybrid gives you a 4K touchscreen and high-end specs for $1,299 (hands-on)

HP adds a colorful new 14-inch Chromebook

HP is adding to its chromebook lineup with a new 14-inch HP Chromebook 14. This slim laptop stays in the same low-end price range as most other budget Chromebooks and Windows laptops, but adds a handful of higher-end features and extras to stand out in a crowded field.

The first thing that stands out about this system is the soft colors of the chassis. Rather than stark silver, black or gray, HP calls this design "Sky Blue," and it combines a soft blue interior and accents with a white lid (the system will also be be available in a silver design).



The current-gen Intel Celeron processor won't offer any performance surprises, but the 14-inch display has a full 1,920x1,080 resolution, and uses an IPS panel (in-plane switching) to prevent the image from looking faded at side angles. HP says the system will also include some potentially valuable extras, including a two-year 100GB Google Drive account and three Google Play movie rentals.

The most interesting bonus is 12 months of free access to GoGo in-flight internet service. If you're a frequent flyer, that could make the laptop practically pay for itself.

Chromebooks continue to build a case for being the perfect low-cost computer, thanks to an increasing reliance on cloud-based tools, from email to video streaming to collaborative office applications. Built around the Chrome web browser from Google, this and other Chrome OS devices offer easy access and simple interfaces, but also lack the ability to install and run many common Windows and Mac software applications, or even store much data locally.

But, if you can live within these limitations, Chromebooks are an increasingly attractive way to get online access in a decent-looking hardware package without spending much money.

The HP Chromebook 14 will cost $249 in the US. The US release date, as well as international price and release details, are not available yet, but HP expects this system to ship in time for the upcoming holiday season.

Lenovo's Yoga 900 laptop hybrid steps up the power

Lenovo's Yoga line of hybrids has been hugely influential, with many PC makers following in the footsteps of its 360-degree folding hinge. The original Yoga was the first hybrid that really sold the concept of Windows 8 as a touchscreen operating system, and subsequent models have generally continued to impress.

Last year's Yoga 3 Pro made some big steps in design, introducing a new style of hinge, nearly universally describes as the "watchband" hinge, with hundreds of individual moving parts coming together for a slimmer, more flexible design. But that otherwise excellent system was held back by a reliance on Intel's then-new Core M processor, intended for slim, premium-price laptops and hybrids. In practice, the Core M gave the Yoga 3 Pro neither the performance nor battery life we expected.


Now Lenovo's high-end Yoga has been rebranded as the Yoga 900, and it keeps the watchband hinge and overall design (with a few tweaks), but moves up to Intel's new sixth-generation Core i5 and Core i7 processors, which we expect will offer much more mainstream performance and battery life.

We've already seen Core i5/Core i7 processors in a few incredibly slim and light systems, such as the Lenovo/NEC LaVie series, to excellent effect. Compared to last year's Yoga 3 Pro, the new Yoga 900 is a hair bigger at 14.9mm thick and 2.8 pounds, but it still feels very portable (the upcoming Surface Book from Microsoft weighs about 3.4 pounds). Lenovo says this the thinnest Core i-series convertible ever.

Besides the new Skylake-generation processors, the Yoga 900 also adds a higher-capacity battery. It has the same 3,200x1,800 13.3-inch display resolution as last year, and is still available in orange, silver and champagne gold.

The Lenovo Yoga 900 will be available from Best Buy and Lenovo's website starting October 19, from $1,199 in the US. International price and availability details are not yet available.

Surface Book review: Microsoft's first laptop shoots for the moon

What good is a touchscreen tablet and stylus if you can't really draw? Despite a teenage comic book collection thousands of issues deep (dating roughly 1985-1991), I never had much of a knack as a visual artist, beyond idle doodling. Sure, I've got a few standby sketches I can whip up when the need arises, from the googly-eyed generic newspaper strip character to some forced perspective boxes, but does that mean I need a $1,499-and-up laptop-plus-stylus Microsoft Surface Book that practically begs to be used by someone with actual artistic talent?


Microsoft's other new system, the less expensive Surface Pro 4, is clearly intended as a full-time tablet that can double as a part-time laptop, thanks to its clever (but sold separately) keyboard cover. And in practice, the Surface Pro is better as a tablet, and certainly great to draw on, but it doesn't do as much for the rest of us who live in the slightly more buttoned-down world of offices, meetings, word processing and all the things that work best on a traditional laptop.


Still, even after watching successive generations of Surface Pro tablet go sliding off my lap, I never thought to myself that Microsoft ought to make a more laptop-like version of its ambitious crossover PC.

And yet, Microsoft went and did just that, surprising nearly everyone (including purportedly all the PC makers who buy Windows 10 from Microsoft to install on their own laptops and tablets) with the Surface Book, a 13.5-inch premium laptop with a detachable touchscreen display and the same high-end stylus pen as the Surface Pro 4.

These two new Surface products are similar but different, like two cover versions of the same song. Both have unusual 3:2 screen aspect ratios, which matches the shape of the standard A4 paper size. If you're using the tablet half in portrait mode and working on projects designed for print, that may indeed be very useful.

Both the Pro and Book versions of the Surface also share many component options, and in fact, our Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 review units had the same Intel Core i5 processor (from Intel's new sixth-generation chips, sometimes referred by the codename Skylake), and the same 8GB of RAM. In the Surface Book, the Core i5 is included in the $1,499 (AU$2,299, but UK release details have not been announced yet) base model. On the Surface Pro 4, it's an upgrade (to at least $999 from the $899 base price).

Our Surface Book review unit is closer to the $1,699 model that doubles the internal solid-state storage to 256GB (we have a 512GB SSD, which does not appear to be a currently available option with the Core i5 CPU). As this review was being written, we also received a second test unit that included one of the more intriguing Surface Book options, a custom Nvidia graphics chip built into the keyboard base (so it's only available when the two halves of the system are together), plus a faster Core i7 processor and 16GB of RAM, for a total of $2,699. Spoiler alert: The significant added expense doesn't turn this into the ultimate PC gaming laptop, but it's good enough for mainstream games at medium graphics settings, and helpful for HD-or-better photo and video editing. (Look for some game benchmarks further along in this review.)

I'm enjoying the Surface Book overall, and I don't feel like I'm wasting its potential just because I'm not using it to design websites or illustrate graphic novels. It's intended to be a three-quarter-time laptop and one-quarter-time tablet, as intuited by the fact that 75 percent of its battery capacity is housed in the keyboard base, with the remaining 25 percent packed behind the display, along with the CPU, memory and most (but not all) of the other components.

So, now that I've got my lap-friendly version of the Surface, does it fulfill all my hybrid hopes and dreams? Microsoft calls the Surface Book the "ultimate laptop," which is a bold claim. Despite my positive impressions of the Surface Book, it's important right up front to say that if I were designing the ultimate laptop, it would not have the unsightly gap between the screen and base visible here when the clamshell is closed; nor would it weigh about 3.5 pounds.

Showing the Surface Book to others, those are first two things that nearly everyone mentions right away. The gap -- "Is it supposed to be like that?" -- and the weight. It doesn't help the latter issue that there's something about the slight wedge shape of the system when closed and its bulky hinge that makes it just slightly awkward to pick up and carry with one hand.