Intel has a strong ultra chic vibe going on, with its super thin, but curiously named “Canoe Lake” concept laptop.
Dubbed the ‘thinnest laptop ever’, it’s only 14mm to the Macbook air’s 19.3mm off the desk. The futuristic all aluminum design is almost 100 per cent gorgeous, although we’re not quite sure we like the big hole under the LCD screen.
Intel designed the concept laptop to sell the idea to manufacturers that netbooks too can be a premium and very sexy bit of kit , and it certainly works.
The design draws a strong sense of curiosity that left us wondering how Intel fits everything inside. It has minimal cooling except for a couple of vents in the rear, but the latest dual-core Atom N550 CPU is only 8.5W at 1.5GHz so doesn’t require that much cooling anyway. It includes the usual Intel GMA3150 graphics all Atoms offer, 2GB of DDR3 memory, a 44KWhr battery and a 120GB hard drive all shoehorned inside.
Despite only being 10 inches in size, it looks and feels bigger compared to other netbooks we’ve used – the keyboard in particular is slightly larger and so much easier to use because of it.
The benefit of being very thin and all that aluminium is that it’s also extremely light – in the hand it can be just sat and balanced on your fingers, and we were assured it could simply be pinched between finger and thumb by the Intel representative keeping an eye on it.
As a concept unfortunately we doubt this will ever make the retail market, but given that desired design is changing from cheaper and plasticy to gorgeously refined metals and sharp looks, we can see there’s still possibly a future hope for netbooks yet!
