There’s another sub-$700 Ultrabook in the US market today – the CyberlinkPC Zeuss, and it’s powered by a Core i5 Ivy Bridge CPU and comes with 8GB of RAM.

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When a new product category comes to Medion, you know it’s gone mainstream. Medion, a Lenovo company, is headquartered in Germany and focuses on good value technology, some of which is exclusively sold through large retailers such as Aldi. Netbooks broke into Aldi in 2008 where 20,000 boxes could be shifted in a matter of hours.  Ultrabooks could do the same.

Big customers like Aldi are big business for Medion, but only when the time is right. The Medion Akoya S4211 could mean that the time is right.

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There’s an Ultrabook battery report out from the Electronics TakeBack Coalition – a company that “promotes green design and responsible recycling in the electronics industry” and it doesn’t look too good. Only 2 Ultrabooks have been highlighted as having removable batteries but there’s a different side to this story that hasn’t been considered by the ETBC.

Report PDF here.

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Use the European comparison engine Skinflint.co.uk today and do a search for Core i5 Ivy Bridge laptops with a screen size up to 13.9” and a weight of under 1.5KG [link] and you’ll find about 32 solutions. 5 of them are Apple MacBook Air solutions, 11 of them are Ultrabook alternatives over 1000 Euros and the rest are Ultrabooks…apart from one which sits nearly 30% cheaper than any other offering. Take the screen size limit down to 11.6” and the Acer V5-171-53314G50 is about half the price of any 11.6 Ultrabook out there; and it’s very difficult to see where the differences are.

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We’ve just had hands-on with the Acer M3 (as I’m going to call it from now on.)

Launching soon, it’s a 15” workhorse of an Ultrabook for an interesting price. €799 starting point. Build quality seems reasonable and at 2KG it’s quite light for the size and features. A 1366×768 screen is a disappointment, a removable battery is an advantage.

More details and the press release in this post. Video below.

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Step into a German newsagents, look at the magazine rack and you’ll find more testing notes than in a NASA launch sequence. That’s why I pay attention to the German tech press – they know how to analyse a product. Chip.de is one of the more well-know computer magazines in Germany and as you’d expect, they’ve got early hands-on with the HP Envy 14 Spectre that will be available in Germany in March for about €1400. It’s a sample unit rather than a final retail build but it’s unlikely to be very different to the final retail version. The article is obviously in German and you can read it via Google Translate but let me highlight a few things for you.

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