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HP adds AMD to the 15-inch Sleekbook and makes the brand more Windows 8 friendly with a touchscreen option.

HP, like most PC companies, debuted most of its new and cool computers in October when Windows 8 launched. So it’s no surprise that the company’s CES offerings are few. This week in Las Vegas HP’s showing off two laptops: The HP Pavilion Sleekbook and the Pavilion TouchSmart Sleekbook. These notebooks start at $480 and will be available within weeks (instead of months from now).

The first to come to market will be the 15.6-inch HP Pavilion Sleekbook. Sleekbook is HP’s moniker for machines that have many Ultrabook-like qualities – such as a thin design, light weight, island-style keyboard, and clickpad – but the specs don’t quite fit into the Ultrabook category. In this case, the Sleekbook comes with an AMD processor (technically, Ultrabooks are Intel-only) and a traditional hard drive instead of an solid-state drive.

You can get up to 1TB of storage in the Pavilion Sleekbook, which would be ultra expensive if it had an SSD inside. The AMD A Series processor also shaves a few pennies off the price. Other specs include USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports, a memory card slot, HDMI, and optional AMD Radeon discrete graphics. Another difference between this laptop and an Ultrabook is that the Sleekbook’s battery is removable.

If this laptop looks familiar, it’s because it uses the same design as existing 15-inch Sleekbooks, just with different options for internal hardware. With AMD in the mix, it’s possible to get the slim and light design at a slightly lower price.

The new HP Pavilion Sleekbook will be available January 13 starting at $480. This includes an AMD A4 CPU, 500GB hard drive, 4GB of RAM, and three color choices: sparkling black, ruby red, and winter blue. It will come with Windows 8, naturally.

For those of you who just can’t deal with Windows 8 if there’s no touch capability, you’ll only have to wait a few extra weeks for the HP Pavilion TouchSmart Sleekbook, which will be out on February 3. Though the specs are about the same here, the starting configuration includes a more powerful AMD A6 CPU, 6GB of RAM, and a 750GB hard drive. Plus, the 15.6-inch display will respond to touch, making it even easier to navigate Windows 8.

The starting price for the TouchSmart model is $650, which is still within the budget realm. For those of you looking for an inexpensive, yet powerful machine, HP is doing its best to deliver.

We’ve only had a little bit of hands-on time with these Sleekbooks, but, so far, we’re impressed by their lightness and sturdy build quality. We’re looking forward to getting them in for review after CES.

A Samsung webpage detailing some of the features the Galaxy S2 will gain after its update to Android 4.1 has been discovered, indicating the company is still working on the new software.

Back in September last year, Samsung announced it would be updating the Galaxy S2 smartphone, along with several other devices including the Galaxy S3, to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. Since then the S3 has received its various updates, but nothing more has been heard on the subject of the Galaxy S2. Most of us know by now that OS updates can take a while to sort out, but we also know that despite manufacturers best efforts, they can be cancelled at the last minute too. Has this happened to the S2?

Although Samsung hasn’t confirmed it, the discovery of a webpage detailing Android 4.1 for the S2 seems to indicate the update is almost complete and will be coming soon. Additionally, the now-aging Galaxy S2 will also get some of the cool new software features seen on the S3, Note 2 and other new Galaxy handsets. The Samsung page has subsequently been replaced with details on the S2’s Android 4.0 update, but SamMobile.com managed to take a sneaky screenshot beforehand.

Here’s the good news first. All the improvements seen with Project Butter – smoother scrolling and faster overall performance – will come to the S2, as will Android’s Easy mode for new users and a Google+ app as standard. Samsung will also squeeze in its Pop-up Play feature, where videos can be watched in a smaller, independent window while doing something else on the phone, plus its Smart Stay feature too. This uses the forward facing video call camera to check when you’re looking at the screen, and keeps it from going to sleep while you are. It’s handy when you’re reading long-form articles or eBooks.

Now for the bad news. According to the page, the update is only going to be available through Samsung’s Kies management software, primarily because it’s estimated to take at least an hour to perform the changeover. Plus, it’s going to eat up an entire gigabyte of internal memory, dropping it from 12GB to 11GB once it’s all done. Ultimately, the pain of having to endure Kies and a little less memory will probably be worthwhile.

Sadly, Samsung hasn’t provided a release date for Android 4.1 on the Galaxy S2, but the appearance of the explanatory webpage could indicate it’s close to release. As usual, when it does arrive it’ll probably be a staggered release beginning with unlocked phones in a few countries, before it eventually makes it onto phones locked to a particular network.

A bold prison break attempt involving a cat, some sticky tape, a mobile phone and a variety of tools ended in failure (are you surprised?) when the feline was spotted by prison guards before it had a chance to make its delivery.

If you were a prisoner hoping to get your hands on a mobile phone to help assist with a breakout, how would you go about it?

A prisoner – or prisoners – in a Brazilian jail thought better of the ol’ file-in-a-cake routine and instead had the novel idea of getting someone on the outside to tape a load of items to a cat in the hope that it would enter the jail unnoticed. It might not surprise you to learn that the plan failed.

Unfortunately for the prisoners, the cat was spotted as it made its way across the grounds of the jail, located in the city of Arapiraca, north-east Brazil.

“An agent saw the cat and went to look at it closely because something about it seemed wrong,” prison guard union head Marcelo Avelino told the O Globo newspaper.

When the prison guards nabbed the feline, they found it had a mobile phone taped to its body, together with a memory card, an earphone, two saws, drills and a number of batteries.

According to a Reuters report about the incident, the cat – which presumably looked like a toolkit on legs – was detained by police.

The authorities are now faced with the tricky task of trying to work out to whom the cat was supposed to be delivering the items. Commenting on the incident over the weekend, a spokesperson for the prison told local newspaper Estado de S.Paulo, “It’s tough to find out who’s responsible for the action as the cat doesn’t speak.” It’s not known if the line was delivered with a wry smile.

One idea might be to line up the prison’s 263 detainees and set the cat free in a twist on the traditional ID parade – it’s bound to head straight to its master. Presumably the mobile phone will also yield some clues.

As for the cat, no charges were brought and it’s now being cared for at an animal center.

[via SMH / Reuters] [Image: AFP/Penitentiary System of Alagoas]

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Toshiba kicks of CES 2013 by unveiling a 1 terabyte hybrid hard drive for its preeminent gaming laptop.

Toshiba’s gaming flagship, the Qosimo X875, has been updated with a new 1TB hybrid laptop hard drive. It combines a small amount of solid state storage with a traditional mechanical drive in an attempt to offer excellent load times and massive storage capacity at a low price.

Hybrid drives are not new. Seagate debuted its Momentus XT line several years ago and many ultrabooks offer a similar arrangement that pairs an independent solid state drive with a standard hard disk. Toshiba’s X875 simply offers more. This would mark the first time a 1TB hybrid drive showed up in a laptop.

The rest of the laptop’s hardware has carried over from the 2012 model and includes a selection of Intel Core i5 and i7 processors as well as Nvidia’s powerful GTX 670M. These specifications should let Toshiba trade blows with Samsung’s Series 7 Gamer and the ASUS G-Series. An appealing entry price of $1,480 should help in that fight.