In just a few hours the press will be gathering in San Francisco for the warm-up to IDF 2012. The Intel Developer Forum is the most important of the years IDF events as it represents the start of a new wave of marketing for Intel and allows analysts to piece together a picture of what Intel will get up to in 2013. In terms of Ultrabooks we already know that we’ve got Windows 8, touch and Haswell coming but there’s more to it than that. Here’s what you can expect from us over the next week as we attend 4 days of Intel events.

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Netbooknews has just published some information they’ve had from Intel during a chat with Navin Shenoy, the President of Intel Architecture Group and General Manager of the Mobile Client Platform. Most of the information wasn’t anything new but there’s a hint towards back-to school offers. As we were expecting, back-to-school offers will be starting in August and real sales numbers will start to show.

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‘ASUS UX21 is First Ever Ultrabook’ was the title of the first post ever on Ultrabooknews and there’s an interesting story behind it. I was watching the keynote from the office (at some crazy morning hour) and as soon as Intel mentioned Ultrabooks, I registered Ultrabooknews.com. Within an hour I had a site up with the first post. Just hours later, the database was active. It’s hard to believe that it was 1 year ago. In 6 years of creating and running over 10 different blogs, Ultrabooknews.com is the fastest growing web site I’ve ever managed.

In the last month we’ve seen huge traction in the Ultrabook and our traffic has doubled. Yesterday was our biggest day ever and we’re expecting even more traffic today. What a great birthday present.

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In this article I put a case forward for the Ultrabook. It follows a similar article in which I put forward an argument against the Ultrabook. You can’t say we’re not assessing all angles on Utrabooknews!

The Ultrabook project, a three-stage plan by Intel to change they way that laptops are designed and manufactured, is now producing its first products and already we’re seeing combinations of weight, price and power that have never been seen in the industry before; Truly ground-breaking notebooks. Early reviews have been very good and despite the expensive changes in design and manufacturing, the price points are competitive.

I’ll talk more about todays Ultrabook products further on in this article but first lets talk about why the Ultrabook project, over 3 years, is advantageous for everyone.

More important than the initial products is the massive change that is being asked of the laptop industry to move to ultra-efficient electronic designs [the battery companies are going to hate this part of the equation. Environmentalists will love it.], sealed unit and single board production by choosing and tightly integrating components and processes. As the change in the laptop continues the result will be advantages for all parts of the industry – a move towards solid state storage, smaller batteries, lower part counts and lower shipping weights. Windows 8 will combine to bring a scenario where the laptop covers a wider range of usage scenarios than ever before. Style included – Dont forget that very important style element for the mature markets.

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