notebooks

In the realm of beautiful, shiny things Dell's new Adamo XPS is among the shiniest and most beautiful. And, if we were in the business of judging (note)books by their covers, we'd leave that at that. That's not our business, though; the Adamo XPS is a gorgeous conversation piece, but a computer worth $1,800 it is not.

Among HP's landslide of Windows 7 PCs announced today are two biz-centric laptops that are a dream for clumsy typists. The HP ProBook 6445 and 6545 have all the unremarkable specs you'd expect in an affordable IT-department-friendly notebook, with one exception: a spill-resistant keyboard.

Laptops keep getting thinner and lighter, but some concept laptops take portable to a new level. Orkin Design's Rolltop consists of an OLED display that can start as a rolled-up mat and deploy as a multi-touch 17-inch laptop. My beastly HP laptop just shed a tear of envy.

The Orkin laptop can also transform into a tablet PC operable with a stylus, or become a standup flat screen display. A power adapter and other features fit with the carrying canister that comes with a convenient holding strap.

Hoping to bring a final end to the era of the exploding notebook, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Silicate Research ISC in Germany are developing batteries without flammable materials.

The liquid electrolytes at the heart of traditional lithium-ion batteries can catch fire, but the Fraunhofer scientists say they've figured out a way to make them with a new, solid polymer that's inflammable, and, since it's solid, won't leak.

Intel rolled out its new low-cost laptop model yesterday, and the machines will boast bigger, 9-inch screens, 30 GB of storage and integrated Web cameras. These new Classmate PCs, which will go on sale in April for somewhere between $300 and $500, are the second iteration of Intel's answer to the One Laptop Per Child organization's cheap laptop, the XO.