While Ultrabooks generally perform to similar efficiencies under load there’s quite a difference when it comes to near-idle operations and that can seriously impact the length of time you can use an Ultrabook as an offline word processor. As a blogger that’s a very important scenario for me and I suspect that if you’re offline and answering a bunch of emails or writing a presentation or report, this scenario is important to you too. If you choose the right Ultrabook you can get 10 hours of typing on one battery charge.

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We’ve got our hands on the Sony VAIO T13 Ultrabook which has so far been quite impressive. In addition to having one of the the most unique designs in the Ultrabook market, the T13 is also one of the cheapest 13″ Ultrabooks you can get your hands on. The build quality is quite impressive  and it resumes nearly instantly from sleep. The T13 will soon be launching with a touchscreen and Windows 8 making this a better time than ever to see if it’s worth waiting for.

Our pal Avram Piltch of LaptopMag got his hands on Acer’s new Aspire S5 Ultrabook and has an in-depth review available for your perusal. Does the S5 stand up to the competition? LaptopMag rated it 3 stars out of 5, but certainly not because of its record breaking SSD array.

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The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime is shaping up to be a hot seller with its quad-core Tegra 3 CPU/GPU combo and its attachable keyboard. Just a few days ago, our pal Ritchie got his hands on the Transformer Prime and produced a great overview video of the device. Now he’s drilling down the specifics.

Ritchie has fielded a number of questions from folks interested in the Transformer Prime, and prepared a whopping 5 new videos for your viewing pleasure. We’ll drop one here, but if you’d like more, certainly go visit the post over at Ritchie’s Room.

This low-light handheld test is important for me as it’s one of my most-used scenarios. I’m also interested in telephoto shots at on-stage press events and various types of video but for my first Panasonic Lumix Z150 test I wanted to see how much better it was than my old (5 year old) Canon S2IS 5MP bridge camera. Of course it’s a massive improvement. I’m estimating a total 8x quality improvement of sensitivity, stabiliser and definition through sensor pixel count and lens. That’s a massive 3 f-stops of usefulness.

All my Lumix FZ150 posts are shown together here.

In this test I took a large number of shots of a multimeter (showing a LUX reading of around 95 from a big 30W daylight-temperature CFL energy-saving bulb 2M away) and chose the best pictures to analyse.

The other two devices used were the Canon S2IS and my Nokia N8 which has a larger sensor than both of the bridge cameras. To help make the images easy to compare I set the ISO at 400 and took the images at about 15 cm, the distance at which the multimeter was full-frame in the non-zoom Nokia N8.

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Taking a bit longer than I originally expected after the ASUS UX31 availability last week are the first 2 reviews of the ASUS UX31 ‘Zenbook’ Ultrabook.  Both reviews originate from Chinese sources.

[UX31 Specifications, Gallery and more information here]

Overall, the initial response seems to be very good. Much better than the first review of the Acer S3 that we saw last week although I am personally disappointed at the use of convertor adaptors to provide VGA and Ethernet. They add weight, take more power than built-in components and are likely to get lost or forgotten. With the case and adaptors added-in, the UX31 weighs a very non-ultrabook 1.8KG.

In both reviews we even get a teardown of the device showing the huge battery area compared to the motherboard. The battery is 50Wh which is a lot more than the 34Wh you get in the Acer S3. As expected, the battery life figures are higher.  Battery life ranges from 129 minutes (full-power test) to nearly 7 hours.

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Thanks to everyone that turned up to watch me mess about with the Samsung 900X3A yesterday evening. We spent a good 2 hours going over almost everything except Bluetooth 3+HS and USB 3.0 which we couldn’t test.

We’ve got the LG Revolution on hand and have prepared an unboxing video for you which also features a flash test. I’m happy to report (and somewhat impressed) that the LG Revolution has so far handled YouTube 720p flash video quite well. This surprised me because the Revolution is using a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU as opposed to Nvidia’s Tegra. Have a look below: