Even before Intel’s new Sandy Bridge is official, we’ve already seen HP laptops with them in the wild. But now they’re officially official. HP just updated a bunch of its consumer laptops here at CES, and the biggest change is that the Envy 17 and Pavilion dv6 and dv7 have been kicked over to Intel’s Sandy Bridge second-gen Core processors.

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As usual, when Intel and AMD launch new processors, manufacturers will be there to take part in demonstrating products utilizing these new chips. HP is launching new budget minded Pavilion desktop series: the p6700 (starting at $300), s5700 ($330), and HPE-500 ($600).

They all offer a wide range of configurations, with the standard-sized p6700 starting out at a Pentium E5700 proc and ranging up to an Athlon II 445 triple-core processor, the slim s5700 ranging from Athlon II 260 dual-core up to Phenom II 511 dual-core, and the HPE-500 blazing away with Phenom II 1045T six-core chips and discrete Radeon HD 6450 graphics, on up to Phenom II 1090T six-core and Radeon HD 6770 graphics.

All of the desktops have “Beats Audio,” an Envy feature that HP is spreading out across its product line. Notice no Sandy Bridge processors here, because they don’t really fall into “cheap chips” category. Other than that, there are few surprises in any of these when it comes to specs and options: prepare to be generally nonplussed. Still, with these new (cheap!) chips from AMD and Intel, budget buyers should get a lot more power for their buck when these desktops land on January 9th.

Have a Mac? Today might be a fun day with your Mac, mate. That’s because the App Store for Mac is live as of last night. Starting with around 1000 free and paid titles which will certainly grow in insane numbers the following months, the Mac App store delivers a familiar interface to iOS device users for downloading, browsing and updating new apps, so you shouldn’t be lost there later.

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Asus announced an oversize tablet at CES, the 12-inch Eee Slate EP121 tablet. Steve Jobs probably won’t agree to a tablet the size of a notebook, same as him disagreeing with a 7-inch tablet. But this is no ordinary tablet. We’ve seen countless of tablets using Intel’s Atom, the new dual-core N550 Atom, and even Nvidia’s dual-core Tegra 2 processor, but what about a quad-core processor in a tablet? Now that’s what I call going over the edge.

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Asus is also in full blow at CES. Besides showing off some Sandy boards, the company also got some tablets up its sleeves for Vegas guests. The first one that we’re going to look at is the 7-inch tablet that’s running on Honeycomb, and it’s called the Eee Pad MeMo. Well, I can safely say that the name does say it all. It’s a tablet, but it also acts (or want to) as a memo, like how a real life memo works, with a pen.

The 7-inch, 1024 x 600 tablet runs Android 3.0, with a dual-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm 8260 processor under the hood and dual cameras (1.2 megapixel at the front, and 5 megapixel at the back with LED flash). The main feature here is a capacitive stylus and two included apps to make the best of it. Read more…

It seemed so, because there’s not only one vendor of iPad accessory showing iPad 2 products, but two. This time they’re not only showing cases for iPad 2, but also a foldable rechargeable battery?

Gopod Mobile was showing off an iPad 2 based foldable rechargeable battery pack developed by the company, and depicts the revised devices redesigned curves, ports, and cameras; it is said by Gopod to represent the actual appearance of the as-yet-unreleased thinner and slightly smaller iPad. That said they have a mock up iPad 2 to illustrate better how their accessories match with the upcoming iPad 2.

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