Lilbits: LG’s big, light laptops leaked, and the HTC HD2 gets new life (again)

There are plenty of thin and light laptops on the market these days. But for years it’s been hard to beat the LG Gram lineup if you want really lightweight notebooks with big displays.

The current lineup includes a 17 inch notebook that weighs less than 3 pounds, a 2.5 pound model with a 15.6 inch display, and a 14 inch notebook that weighs just 2.2 pounds.

So what’s next? More of the same… sort of.

LG has a habit of announcing its new LG Gram notebooks in December, a week or two before the annual Consumer Electronics Show. But details are starting to leak a little early, and it looks like the company plans to replace the LG Gram 15 with a new 16 inch model, following the lead of Apple and other companies that have been cramming bigger screens into notebooks with slimmer bezels in order to increase the display size without increasing the overall footprint.

New LG Gram 14 and LG Gram 17 models are also allegedly on the way.

Here’s a roundup of recent tech news from around the web.

• LG will release a redesigned 16-inch LG Gram in 2021, next to new 14 and 17-inch models [NotebookCheck]
  It looks like the 2021 LG Gram line of lightweight laptops will come in 14, 16, and 17 inch sizes. It seems likely that the 16 inch model replaces the previous-gen LG Gram 15. No word on whether there are 13.3 inch or smaller models on the way.
• The Google Pixel 4a 5G gets its first custom ROM and kernel [xda-developers]
  An unofficial LineageOS 18 port is now available for the Google Pixel 4a 5G, making it one of the first custom ROMs for Google’s latest mid-range smartphone.
• Nordic Semiconductor expands into Wi-Fi [Nordic Semiconductor]
  Nordic Semiconductor acquires all of Imagination Technologies’ WiFi assets including dev team and IP. Nordic will now be able to offer WiFi IoT solutions as well as Bluetooth and cellular.
• Amazon Kindle now comes with double the storage [Amazon]
  Amazon’s entry-level Kindle (which happens to be on sale for $60 at the moment), now comes with 8GB of storage, up from the previous 4GB. (via the eBook Reader)
• PINEBOOK Pro USB-C Docking Deck
  Available now for $45, this USB-C docking station is designed to add a whole bunch of ports to Pine64’s cheap Linux laptops (or smartphones), but it should work with most gadgets with USB-C ports.
• Plasma Bigscreen – Updated Beta 2 Image Release For Raspberry Pi 4 [AIX]
  Developers with the KDE team have been working on an open source, TV-friendly user interface for much of the year. This new beta for the Raspberry Pi 4 features an updated version of the KDE Neon operating system and updates to the Mycroft voice assistant, among other things.
• PostmarketOS running on an HTC HD2 smartphone [@Holmesherlock22]
  The phone that just won’t die – released in 2009, it was the last phone to ship with Windows Mobile (before Microsoft switched to Windows Phone), but independent developers have been porting alternate operating systems to run on it for years, ranging from Windows RT to Android to… this Linux-based OS..

Postmarketos is really a quite lightweit os 🙂 pic.twitter.com/2VDCBbpqdq

— Dominduchami (@Holmesherlock22) November 28, 2020

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