If theres one laptop maker I got excited about at IFA, its this French brand youve never heard of

Date:
Wed, 13 Sep 2023 15:10:55 +0000

Description:
Youre probably not familiar with Thomson, but if theres one tech brand Id
like to see break into the US market, its this one.

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I recently went to IFA 2023 in Berlin, and Ill be honest: it wasn't a particularly exciting year at the tech expo for laptop fans. Last year saw
the arrival of two awesome cutting-edge foldable laptops the Asus Zenbook 17 Fold OLED and the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold Gen 2 , both of which I tested at the event but this year I felt relegated to the minor leagues as my colleagues on the TV and home tech teams got to enjoy the more exciting hardware.

Still, I wouldnt be deterred, so I set out to hunt for anything new and exciting within my computing sphere and what I found surprised me.

Thomson (and parent company Vantiva) is a brand Im only tangentially familiar with; while its a veritable juggernaut in Europe, this French company has yet to properly breach other markets. Still, its a household name in many
European countries, manufacturing everything from smart TVs to vacuum
cleaners and, as it turns out, some rather impressive laptops. Thomthing to think about

Although France is the companys base of operations, the team members helming Thomsons stand at IFA were keen to talk about future goals of expanding into the Americas. And after seeing what Thomson has to offer in the PC hardware department, if theres one brand Id like to see break into the US market, its this one.

The laptop that immediately caught my attention was the new Zettabook A14 (pictured at the top of this article), a compact ultrabook with a starting price that roughly translates to around $800 / 650 / AU$1,200. In terms of specs, its fairly middle-of-the-road, with an Intel Core i3 or i5 CPU and
16GB of DDR5 memory along with 512GB of speedy PCIe 4.0 storage. The display is a 14-inch 1080p panel, again pretty standard, but fair for the asking price.

Its a rather unassuming laptop with its matte black exterior and white LED-backlit keyboard, but what caught my attention was the weight. The Zettabook weighs about 900 grams, putting it in the same weight class as the popular LG Gram series. Its quite phenomenally lightweight, to the point
where I was almost worried Id break it but the chassis and screen hinge actually felt surprisingly durable. Thomson had all sorts of stuff on
display, but I'll pick a laptop over an air purifier any day of the week (Image credit: Future) A plethora of products

The Zettabook was far from the only laptop Thomson had to show off, too.
There were a variety of productivity laptops (which mostly looked good, if boring) as well as Thomsons foray into gaming hardware, the Roxxor G16
laptop. The Roxxor G16 isn't available outside of Europe yet... but it should be (Image credit: Future)

The build reminds me of Gigabytes affordable gaming machines; a decent level of quality that doesnt measure up to the fine aesthetics of more premium brands, but feels sufficiently robust.

The pleasingly large touchpad and full-scale keyboard were a welcome
addition, and there was a decent selection of ports on offer too a trait shared by the Zettabook A14, which included HDMI and microSD support, an increasingly rare sight among the best ultrabooks . Cloud gaming might still be in its infancy, but the Roxxor XCLOUD is undeniably a nice little purpose-built laptop (Image credit: Future)

There was also the XCLOUD laptop, a budget Windows gaming laptop designed specifically to be used with cloud gaming services like Xbox Game Pass and GeForce Now . Its a compact piece of hardware with a minimalist design, evoking the similarly cloud-gaming-focused Acer Chromebook 516 GE . Ive been critical of gaming Chromebooks in the past, but its fair to say at this point that cloud gaming is here to stay, so its good to see purpose-built devices for it that swap out ChromeOS for the more versatile Windows 11.

If youre reading this, Luis Martinez-Amago (thats the CEO of Vantiva, thanks Wikipedia), please bring these laptops to the US and beyond. Healthy competition is rarely a bad thing, and since the blanket bans on Huawei laptops, Id certainly like to see more affordable and mid-range laptops for sale from lesser-known brands. Make it happen, Thomson! You might also like New Apple leak is bad news for MacBook fans Will Chromebook Plus be the
future of Google-powered laptops? The MacBook Air M2 is so good it's given Apple a problem



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/computing/laptops/if-theres-one-laptop-maker-i-got-e xcited-about-at-ifa-its-this-french-brand-youve-never-heard-of


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