Juicy PC Notebook Lineup at CES 2008

Buyer's remorse is the curse of high-tech life. I just bought a new laptop. I haven't even finished migrating my data yet (if ever), and I'm already lusting after the next generation. I know it's totally indulgent to always want what you can't have, but wait until you see this next crop of notebooks. They've got some real spice and variety.

Here's a sampling of three: One focuses on breakthrough amounts of storage, one is for the pound- and security-conscious traveler, and one is for the gaming crowd.

Asus has been a longtime fixture on the international scene, especially in Asia and Japan. (How many other companies can talk about cultivating "chi" and inner strength in their mission statement?)

Now Asus is making some noise in the United States. The Asus Eee is one of our Last Gadget Standing finalists. I got to play with it last week and was thoroughly impressed. At CES, the company will be showing a notebook with storage to spare. The Asus M70 is the first notebook to feature a terabyte of memory, enough to store a quarter-million songs or 1,000 hours of video! Both the M50 (500GB) and the M70 feature Hitachi's tiny new hard drives. At at just 2.5 inches, they qualify (for the moment) as the smallest high-capacity drives on the market.

Lenovo's IdeaPads, starting at $799, offer a unique security feature called VeriFace. Instead of swiping your fingerprint for security, you stare into the embedded IdeaPad camera to biometrically log yourself on to your machine. If the system recognizes your face, you're in. Another IdeaPad innovation is the elimination of the bezel around the screen so that you get a frameless/larger image. One of the more stunning IdeaPads is the U110, an ultraportable that weighs only 2.3 pounds with an 11-inch widescreen display and an optional solid-state flash drive. (It will be available in April.)

Gateway is going for the gamer notebook enthusiasts with the introduction of the P-Series FX edition. The features of the FX desktop line, including the Nvidia GeForce Graphics and HDMI, are now available in a portable notebook with a 17-inch screen.

The FX series will begin at about $1,300; most of the FX notebooks will use an Intel Core 2 Duo processor with Intel Centrino Mobile Technology. At the highest end ($2,999), the P-171XL FX Edition will have an HD DVD drive and rely on the new Intel Mobile Extreme X7900 processor, which is built to be more responsive. The FX will be in stores immediately after Gateway announces the product at CES 2008.