If Dell’s Vostro V13 was Batman’s laptop , it looks like the new Vostro 3000 series might just be Bruce Wayne’s. They’re portable, powerful, and sleek rigs for professionals. But are they a value play, or a luxury item? That’s the big unanswered question right now, though we’ll know soon enough; they go on sale today in the US. If the pricing is in line with the V13, though, these could be worth a closer look. The Vostro 3300 , 3400, 3500, and 3700 range from 13-inches to 17-inches, and all offer Core i3 and Core i5 processor options

Acer’s working on some viddy, viddy slim laptops with Intel Calpella processors inside, according to Digitimes . Calpella was rumored to be making an appearance in the MacBook Pro line last year , but never materialized. The laptops will be called the Calpella Slim series, and will come in 13, 14 and 15-inch models, measuring less than an inch thick. [ Digitimes ]

Our crack team over at Engadget Chinese has managed to snag the above roadmap slide for Lenovo’s mobile computer division. We’ve seen earlier versions of the same slide — when the Edge and T410 / T510 were freshly added — but the very latest iteration contains a quartet of new machines. Most intriguing will be the L400 and L500, which are set to replace the former “corporate mainstream” mainstay R series , which incites the more hopeful among us to believe that perhaps a new chassis design is on the cards. No less notable are the new X201 models, though we might surmise by the mild numerical change that they’ll just be upgraded to low-voltage Arrandale CPUs and left well enough alone.

With phones, cameras and computers packing projectors nowadays, it’s only fair for HP to want in on the portable projector scene considering they’ve conquered the attractive home office projector market. Attractive for PowerPoint professionals, anyway. According to the Vice President and manager of personal computing systems group at HP Taiwan, Monty Wong, HP’s working on a tablet PC and notebook launch for this year, both with integrated pico-projectors. While they haven’t shown off any proper tablet prototypes (like their rival Dell has, with the Mini 5 ), if you cast your mind back a few years you might remember HP Touchsmart tablet PCs were all the rage for a while. It was certainly fun playing Solitaire on them with a stylus, anyway.

So Acer’s new Aspire 3811TZ and Aspire 3811TZG may not be puke-green like Sony’s VAIO W Eco , but that doesn’t mean they aren’t some of the greenest — as in eco-friendly — laptops out there. Part of the company’s thin-and-light Timeline series, the two 13.3-inch laptops have been named by Greenpeace as being completely free of those bad-for-the-environment materials, including PVC (polyvinyl chloride) and BFR (brominated flame retardants). Powered by Intel ULV Core 2 Duo CPUs, they are more power-efficient than most and last longer on a charge. There doesn’t seem to be an official statement from Acer on availability and price on these models, but we assume like the rest of the Timeline bunch there will be models both north and south of a grand.

Since the royal unveiling of HP’s six new Elitebooks and ProBooks last week , the Elitebook 8440w (w standing for workstation) has been making the review rounds, and receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback from the chaps at Notebook Review , LAPTOP and Computer Shopper . All were impressed by the Core i7-620M and NVIDIA Quadro FX 380M power that’s been crammed into the 14-inch chassis, but unsurprisingly that causes some warm underside temperatures. Other than that, the 8440w received high praise for its durable gunmetal-build and “exceedingly” comfortable keyboard, but the touchpad was noted as being too small. Actually, the guys over at Notebook Review even go as far to say that the laptop would be “absolutely perfect” if that pad and its buttons weren’t so squished. Now that’s quite a bold statement. All in all, the 8440w seems like a solid and very mobile workstation, but hit up the sources if you’re dying to know more about the $1,650 rig

Designer Emil Kozak has knocked together some graphic Dell skins which will help out the (Product) Red charity. There’s four different designs, with 23 color variations to choose from, and conveniently help disguise the fact that you own a Dell. They’re $65 each, and are available now. [ Dell via Emil Kozak via 2Day Blog ]

Toshiba’s new 11.6-inch Satellite T115 and 13.3-inch Satellite T135 won’t be the flashiest thin-and-light notebooks on the market, but they’re an economical entry point into the increasingly popular class of casual-use, ultraportable laptops. At less and inch thick and weighing in under four pounds, both new Satellites are portable, have 720p native resolution displays and cost as little as $450. The processor options aren’t anything to go crazy over, but with the optional Intel Pentium SU4100 the notebooks can achieve up to nine hours of battery life. They won’t be your best bet for a primary computer, and I wouldn’t ask them to do too much heavy lifting, but at the lower ranges the Satellite T100 series appears to offer better than average value. Toshiba’s thinnest and lightest Satellite laptops, T100 series laptops are ultrathin PCs built for everyday mobility.

Somewhere between the buttoned-up utility of the ThinkPad and the sleek efficiency of the IdeaPad sits an untapped sweet spot for affordable, entry-level notebooks. At least, that’s clearly what Lenovo is banking on with their new ThinkPad Edge series. The ThinkPad Edge purports to be targeted towards small and medium-sized businesses, but it’s just as easy to say that it’s equally unfit for both casual users and serious professionals. While it’s a perfectly capable machine in most respects and a decent buy for the money, it often feels like a compromise to an argument no one was having. Price and Configuration The system we tested was loaded up with a 1.3 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 ULV processor and Intel GS45 chipset, and 4GB (2×2GB) of DDR3 RAM (1066MHz). You can also customize up to 500 GB of HDD storage

Lenovo has always had a certain knack for producing some of the most reliable, ergonomic and slender ultraportables on the market (see ThinkPad X301 and ThinkPad X200 ). But they’ve always had one issue: prices that ring up at well over a grand. Where’s the killer ThinkPad ultraportable for the rest of us been? Well hello, ThinkPad Edge 13 - a thin, light Intel ULV powered laptop with an entirely new design that starts at $549. Yes, $549