It’s an exciting, stylish, well-built and thought-provoking Ultrabook Convertible. The ASUS Taichi 21 contains two screens and can be used as a tablet, or a very mobile Ultrabook. Read the full review below.

That was fun! In fact, the most fun I’ve had with an unboxing for a long time. Notebooksbilliger.de (a German PC retailer) sent over the ASUS Taichi 21 for testing and the unboxing was a real pleasure. Nice packaging aside, it’s the screens, yes screens, on the ASUS Taichi that are the headliner and because of the slightly lighter build compared to the bigger Ultrabook convertibles it feels like it’s closer to the sweet-spot for Ultrabook convertibles. There are a few issues to think about though.

There’s been a rush of news on the ASUS Vivo Tab Smart this week. It’s the 10 inch low-cost Windows 8 tablet on Intel Clovertrail. It might be new to the tech-journalists at CES but it’s been out for a while already so I’m going  to point you to a couple of videos from Mobilegeeks who have already unboxed it…

It’s on pre-order in the USA for $499 and it’s available in Europe for 499 Euros. An LTE version is available there for 599. At 580gm it’s pretty lightweight and you’ll notice that there isn’t a docking keyboard with this one. ASUS have chosen to offer a Bluetooth keyboard. The TranSleeve which you can see in the second video, covers the screen and is foldable to make a stand. It looks a little awkward.

Thanks Mobilegeeks.

Thanks to guest poster Ef Jay (@efjay01) we’ve got an owner review of the Asus Vivo Tab, the Clovertrail based Windows 8 Tablet.

The Asus Vivo Tab is another entrant in the Clovertrail-powered range of Windows 8 hybrid tablet devices designed to offer an experience that covers productivity use with “legacy inch Windows 7 x86 programs and the new Modern style apps from the Windows store while offering the long battery life advantages of ARM devices. I’ve been using it for over a month and here is my review.

Until WiGig docks take off next year the only thing Ultrabook users can use are the USB3.0 docks that are available from Toshiba, Lenovo and others. The problem with those is that they were designed for bigger laptops and assume you’ve already got a DVD drive. The ASUS VariDrive solves that problem.

Gigabit Ethernet, Dual display outputs, USB3.0 hub and DVD drive in one. The only thing that is missing is an analogue audio in and out port for those Skype headphones.

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Here’s a chance for anyone 18+ in the US to win an Asus Zenbook. My Life Scoop is running a contest that can be entered through the 11th of December. The prizes are an Asus Zenbook Ultrabook and an iPad 3 which will go to two individual winners.

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As I checked the list of top selling laptops at Amazon.com again this morning I noted that the ASUS Vivobook X202 touchscreen ultrathin, an Ultrabook-a-like for most consumers, was at position 10 for the second day running. Note, that we’re talking about the laptop category best-sellers list that includes two cheap Chromebooks, a couple of Apple laptops and a clutch of value laptops. Later this morning I picked up on a full review of the ASUS S200, the European version of the X202, and it gets a lot of praise. In our own ranking system, based on visitor view numbers, the X202 / S200 is #11 out of over 100 Ultrathins.  This ultrathin is on target to be the big hit this season and that’s something Intel need to take a close look at. It sounds bad. It’s not.

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This is going to disappoint many of you. We’ve just read, from a couple of UK-based reviews, that the ASUS Taichi 11.6 (and we assume.13.3″) does not have two touchscreens. Only the outside screen is touch enabled.

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