Windows notebooks offered for sale in North America are stuck in evolutionary stasis. The reason is simple: A small number of Asian manufacturers build major brand notebooks. Exterior design and interior components shared across vendors lower manufacturing costs and bring "new" models to market faster. Efforts to enliven the genre tend to be focused on superficial shelf appeal. Large speaker grilles, Windows Media Player transport buttons, and blue LEDs (borrowed from gamer/enthusiast desktops) typify low-value bells and whistles that can be inexpensively overlaid on a formulaic design. More than one observer has posited that such gewgaws serve the added purpose of distracting buyers from the absence of purposeful ingenuity and backsliding build quality.

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Site: InfoWorld Feed: Hardware News () Url: http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-b... Views: 3 Added On: 2008-07-08 13:10:40

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