Brad Linder of Liliputing has an article up today about the lack of Dell Netbooks on the US site. After a follow-up by Joanna Stern of The Verge, Dell has now confirmed it is dropping netbooks and, apparently, any development of notebooks on the Cedar Trail platform. The focus in 2011, according to the Dell spokesperson, is ‘Thin and Light.’

I have two thoughts. Number 1 is that the Cedar Trail platform doesn’t exactly equate to netbooks and I think there’s space for 11.6” ultralights on that platform. They would offer reasonable CPU power and with an SSD and a redesign have every chance of riding on the coat-tails of Ultrabooks to offer a very cheap and stylish thin and light solution.

The second thought, of course, is when are the Dell Ultrabooks coming?

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Despite Acer’s bullish proposals for an updated S3 ultrabook in April next year it looks like new Ultrabooks won’t start hitting shelves until the second half of 2012 but when they do, we can expect CPU and GPU clock boosts along with the extra goodness that’s going into the chipsets.

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Fujitsu may have launched the SH771 high-end ultra-light but that doesn’t mean they aren’t going to produce an Ultrabook. How do we know? We have pics of Fujitsu Ultrabooks!

Sent to us from Mr Blurrycam himself and marked-up with equally fuzzy information, these pics are supposed to have been shown in a private event recently and were highlighted as Ultrabooks for the 2012 market.

There’s two models being shown here. One is an almost ready 13”er, the other, just a plastic prototype of an 11” Ultrabook which leads us to believe that we’re looking at a Sandy Bridge model and a slightly thinner Ivy Bridge device here.

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Back at IDF in Sept we were told that most of Intel’s marketing spend next year will be on Ultrabooks. It seems hard to believe but what is for sure is that there will be a large sum of money involved. Companies producing Ultrabooks (that qualify) can look forward to marketing and advertising help along with a raft of generic Ultrabook advertising. Expect to see the first of this at CES where Intel is bound to be supporting all the Ivy Bridge partners and a big bunch of journalists.

In an interview to be published in the German Handelsblatt newspaper tomorrow, Tom Kilroy, VP of sales and marketing at Intel gives more information. Although the full article is not yet available, a press release (in German) gives selected details.

“Im kommenden Jahr werden die Ultrabooks im Zentrum unserer größten Marketingkampagne seit Jahren stehen”

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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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Mooley Eden was on stage at IDF this morning to deliver 1hr of Ultrabook presentation. Add the coverage that Ultrabooks got in the first keynote and you’re looking at about 40% of the total keynote stage time being dedicated to Ultrabooks. It’s clear where Intels marketing dollars will be going next year.

Mooley set the scene by talking about PC market growth saying that China had overtaken the US market as #1. “Emerging markets are on fire” he adds. In a market full of tablet and smartphone competition, he needed to do that.

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It’s a strange time to be showing next-generation Ultrabooks when the first gen aren’t available but there they were at the Ultrabook showcaseat IDF today.

Next generation Ultrabooks will run on Ivy Bridge, the 3rd Generation of the Core processor which will bring some power savings and, we suspect, cost reductions. None of the prototypes looked overly impressive and there’s no noticeable difference in size or weight so clearly the deal will be in the details. We do wonder how many customers will delve that deep. Brand and pricing will becoming very critical.

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