After nearly two years of Ultrabooks the Samsung Series 7 Ultra came along and ticked all the boxes we had listed for an Ultrabook. Finally a combination of screen, performance, battery, ports, storage and price that looked interesting. Our first hands-on was positive but it’s take a long time to reach the shelves and we’re now just days away from Haswell. Can Samsung expect sales or is it going to get crushed by the third generation of Ultrabooks on the 4th Generation of Intel Core processor? We suspect that most […]

[US focused post] The Toshiba U945 is a great value Ultrabook and you can get the 1.8Ghz Core i3 version for $479 on Amazon.com today. The Core i5 version, with Turbo Boost, is available for $568. Removable battery, easy upgrade access for HDD and RAM, backlit keyboard, good port selection and, good Wi-Fi performance, a keyboard and trackpad that works well and, for the 14” laptop category, a reasonable weight. As a desktop with external monitor the Core i5 version will satisfy. For occasional away-from-home use, the battery life is […]

  “Designed for Gaming” says the advertising for the Razer Blade Ultrabook. We say you should look closely at this one even if you’re not a gamer. Haswell, 1600×900, 70Wh battery and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 765M make this Ultrabook unique. The design is pretty hot too.

The Toshiba Portege Z10T is filtering into channels around the world so we’ve taken the chance to update the Toshiba Portege Z10T Information page by adding a few new videos and some specs. Some new pricing details and a summary are below.    

Computex is just days away, an Intel 4th-Gen Core launch party invite has gone out, we’ve spotted a ramp-up of Intel Ultrabook advertising and Intel have even slipped up with a 4th-Gen Core YouTube video that’s now been removed. Intel’s 4th-Gen Core, previously codenamed Haswell, will launch in the next days. Google spotted an Intel 4th Gen Core launch video…which Intel have now removed!

The Lenovo Yoga 11S appeared for pre-order in the US a few days ago and you can now pre-order three 11s models in Europe. German retailer Notbooksbiliiger.de have revealed two Lenovo 11s models along with a few more specs, pricing and pre-order. Starting at €899 with a Core i3 and going up to a Core i5 with 256GB and 8GB RAM for €1199. In the USA the Core i5 (4Gb/128GB) model is $799 so clearly the EU prices have been set too high. Don’t be tempted at that price.

I read a few IDC new releases today. The PC outlook is bad. The Tablet outlook is good. Take another look though, ignore some of the news articles riding on the back of the headline PR and you’ll see something interesting. Firstly there’s no obvious consideration of PC evolution into the tablet market. Secondly, there’s a huge opportunity opening up in the 8-13 inch segment. As tablet users start to prefer those smaller, cheaper tablet devices, more value and capability is needed in the larger screen segment.

Asus has become one of the first (if not the first) PC manufacturers to announce an Ultrabook with an Intel Haswell CPU, the VivoBook 551, and along with the new silicone the new PC also packs some other features.