14 DAY TRIAL // United Kingdom-based notebook vendor Rock has just pulled the veil off a new, sleek ultra-portable notebook offering that resembles Apple's MacBook Air and Toshiba's Port?g? R500.
Called the Pegasus P210, the new laptop PC is quite a surprise, given the fact that Rock is mostly known for its huge, desktop-like semi-mobile systems. You might remember the Xtreme SL8 behemoth that used to come with a quad-core desktop processor and the Nvidia GeForce 8800 SLI graphics card for notebooks.
This time, Rock stuns the audience with exactly the opposite: a slender 12-inch ultra-sexy notebook that weighs about a kilo. This means that you may take your Rock notebook with you even if you plan to leave your car at home.
The Pegasus notebook is powered by Intel's A110 processor running at 800MHz - an older sibling of the Atom series of chips. The A110 is extremely similar with the Dothan silicon, used in the Pentium M series some time ago. Under the sleek hood, the manufacturer stuffed 1GB of 667MHz DDR 2, which should do the trick, since the A110 only supports a 400 MHz Front Side Bus.
The system comes with an 80 GB hard-disk drive, that connects to the system via a parallel-ATA interface. The 12-inch anti-glare display can deliver a maximum resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels and is fueled by Intel's GMA950 integrated graphics core.
Although the system is not a mobile rocket, the connectivity options are well covered and include on-board Bluetooth and 802.11a/g/n Wi-Fi, Gigabit Ethernet RJ-45 connector and optional 3G HSDPA. Moreover, the P210 notebook comes with three USB ports, a PC card slot as well as a four-in-one card reader.
Rock seems to be extremely flexible with its customers. Upon purchasing a new notebook, you may opt-out for the pre-installed trial and demo applications that usually come with the computer. Unlike other notebook vendors, Rock removes the software at no additional cost.
