Taiwanese ODMs which produce notebooks for some of the world’s biggest brands including Acer, Dell, HP and Lenovo are set to see shipments fall by up to 20% in April as the transition to Intel’s much anticipated Ivy Bridge platform takes hold.</p><p>

The new chips are set to land later in the month, but large scale shipments of notebooks based on the processors are not likely until the end of the quarter, according to Digitimes.

But expected to rise in May and June. You know what this means? New laptops in May.

Services such as PayPass—which will allow users to make payments by tapping their credit cards to the device using NFC—and Nuance speech recognition are being incorporated into new Intel partner devices. The goal, said the chip giant, is not only to produce thinner and lighter machines, but laptops that are both fast and capable too, thanks to Intel’s forthcoming Ivy Bridge chipset.

OLPC’s XO 3.0 tablet is encased in lime green plastic like its laptop counterpart. It has a solar panel cover that can generate four watts of power (which delivers two hours of usage) after charging for an hour. It can also be powered using a hand-cranked power supply. Six minutes of cranking will net you two watts of power, or one hour of usage.

Interesting how HP, with its big corporate sales, is faring worse than the industry average.

"Ultrathin notebooks may be all the rage these days, but there's one big barrier standing in the way of their seemingly unstoppable march to market dominance: Apparently, Apple has a stranglehold on the batteries needed to power them."<br />
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Stop just a minute and think about this, though (it's based on a report in Digitimes). Apple has about 4% of the entire PC market; slightly more of the overall laptop market. It ships about 10m per year.<br />
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If Apple has cornered the market for ultrathin laptop batteries, you'd have to conclude that it's a very tiny market if the other makers of the 95% of laptop PCs can't get a look in. It's possible this is right, but surprising if so.

"Expect some great deals on Acer laptops in coming weeks. The Taiwanese giant has huge amounts of unsold stock to shift and looks set to flood Europe with more than three million machines.<br />
"Where will the stock be dumped and at what cost? We will we know only when they turn up in store at prices too true to be good - for rival notebook vendors. But we understand that negotiations with large retailers have already started."