It’s one of the most Ultraboooky Ultrabooks out there. The Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro sits with the Sony Vaio Pro 13 and the Samsung ATIV Book 9 as showcase devices that are fast, light, stylish and very very usable. The Yoga 2 Pro, however, differs in that it’s a convertible. You wouldn’t know it at first glance though because it’s under 16mm thick and weighs just 1400 grams / 3 pounds. You can’t tell an Ultrabook from it’s thickness and weight though so let’s get into the full review of […]

In a report by Bloomberg the Acer CEO is said to have blamed early Ultrabook and touchscreen investments as a mistake. Acer had problems in 2013 as share value dropped following poor sales results. “We need to dig ourselves out of a hole.” Jason Chen said. This is a story that will bounce around a bit today.

It’s probably more important than the screen – the keyboard – part of the holy trinity of notebook priorites. K-V-M. I asked the question on Google Plus yesterday – What was your best experience? I got a large number of responses that were fairly varied. That shouldn’t be a surprise as we all type at different angles, weights and with differing requirements for numeric keypads, F&J locating bumps, function keys, pressure, throw, pitch and even noise.

You might know M.2 as NGFF, the ‘next generation form-factor’ for plugin modules on laptop and small-form-factor motherboards.  You can find out more here but in short, it’s either a SATA or PCIe interface to modules like SSD, LTE and the like. MyDigitalSSD kindly sent a half-height M.2. SATA over along with a $199 Chromebook so here’s the how-to, video and results of the Acer C720 Chromebook upgrade.

The big CES2014 Ultrabook news summary is that there isn’t really anything major to talk about, which needs talking about. Given that there were no major Ultrabook announcements or evidence of Ultrabook marketing at CES2014 we now have to think about the future of the Ultrabook and leading-edge notebooks. Importantly, who’s going to carry the flag for new PC technologies? Or was CES2014 just a break in the project to allow Intel to promote themselves in newer emerging technologies? What’s next for the Ultrabook, Ultrabook 2014.

I’ve been using a Bitlocker encrypted drive for a month now and it’s been totally transparent in terms of speed. I’m surprised. I’m also surprised that it was available on my Windows 8.1 (not Pro) OS. Inspired to boost security on my Ultrabook I’ve also enabled secure boot, increased the security level, made sure Defender and Firewall are working and, this is contentious, made sure my login is only via Windows Live account so the password can be changed remotely. Given the reporting and password / device management in the […]

Should we, in the ultra-mobile computing sector, take any notice of Chromebooks? Of course we should. We should pay attention to Android, to IOS, Sailfish and Windows Phone too. Simple. Here’s the long answer about why we need to pay attention to Chromebooks but first let me admit that I’ve only recently been inspired to take a closer look after MyDigitalSSD sent me an M.2 SATA drive and a Chromebook to do an upgrade on. I’ve done that upgrade and I’ll be dropping the Super Cache 2 into an Ultrabook […]

Panasonic is well known for their Toughbook line of rugged devices and at CES today have unveiled a couple of new Toughpad tablets including a fanless 7 inch model with a Haswell processor that’s as rugged as anything they have produced before.