We’re in a good place with Ultrabooks right now. Haswell gave us the battery life we were waiting for and prices have come down. Effectively the Ultrabook project is over but the brand, and the soul of the Ultrabook continues. A Dell XPS13 has been leaked for Q3 and it’s highly likely we’ll see a launch at Computex in June but don’t expect any large-scale products or refreshes until Q4. While some may say that’s a slip, it was much the same with the last generation.

With Broadwell we can expect another tick (or was it a tock?) in the Intel strategy of improving processor architecture and then improving the manufacturing process. This time round we’re moving to a 14nm process which, like the move from Sandy Bridge to Ivy Bridge, gave us power efficiencies. We also got a refreshed GPU in that round too so maybe we’ll see some ‘Iris’ action on Ultrabooks later this year.

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.

Read the full story

At a presentation today Intel introduced Realsense Technology and showed three ultrabook-like products that will include the 3D camera hardware. Lenovo, ASUS and Dell are on-board.

Read the full story

“IDF 2013 represents the beginning of a new era for Intel” says the first line of the keynote overview for Intel’s Developer Forum 2013. It starts on Tuesday Sept 10th in San Francisco and we’ll be there. IDF is always an informative experience and, if you listen and read carefully, you get some big tips on Intel’s strategy.

Read the full story

You saw the Creative 3D camera used in the Ultimate Coder challenge earlier this year and you probably heard that it’s going to be available as the Senz3D consumer product but there’s more going on. Intel expects depth sensors to be built into PCs by late 2014 and Intel Capital is putting $100 Million into the arena.

Read the full story

The winner of the Perceptual Computing competition has just been announced by Intel

The Ultimate Coder Challenge put seven teams together and challenged them to make showcase applications for a Lenovo Yoga 13 Ultrabook and the Creative sensor hardware, in seven weeks. We watched with amazement at how much the teams learnt, wrote, developed and optimised their apps. We found hardware limitations, software limitations and problems with gestures themselves but that’s exactly what we needed. The judges, teams and Intel have put hundreds of hours effort into finding out what works and what doesn’t. It will all help the development of perceptual computing, ‘Percie’ as some are calling it now, solutions for Ultrabooks, AIO and other screens in the future.

The winner was a team that took puppetry and put into other peoples hands…

Read the full story

Leap Motion is an inexpensive Kinect-like 3D sensor that made waves when it was announced months ago thanks to its high fidelity low-latency tracking. The company recently announced a partnership with HP to bring Leap technology to HP products. If you’ve been following the Ultrabook realm closely as we have, you’ll know that Intel has been pushing their ‘Perceptual Computing‘ initiative in an attempt to take Ultrabooks and PCs to the next level of human-computer interaction with natural inputs like touch, gesture, voice, etc. It seems like HP may be attempting to leap-frog Intel in that regard.

Read the full story

After a few days of setting up and testing I’ve spent a good amount of time with all of the submissions to the Ultimate Coder Challenge where showcase applications are being built for a Lenovo Yoga 13 Ultrabook to demonstrate the Intel Perceptual Computing hardware. It has at times been frustrating but as I write this I do feel a rush of excitement for a new wave of input methods. It will take some years to perfect this technology, software and methods but, without a doubt, there’s something special going on here. Pay attention!

Read the full story