Even though we blew the lid off of the Sony’s first official entry into the Ultrabook space a few weeks ago thanks to Sony EU, Sony US has been completely silent about the VAIO T series… until now. The VAIO T launches in the US as one of the first Ivy Bridge Ultrabooks, and also at a very respectable price: $769.

Read the full story

AnandTech has their hands on a second-gen Ultrabook reference design and they’ve subjected it to a number of tests. They paint a good picture of the changes you will see from first-generation Ultrabooks (Sandy Bridge) to second-gen Ultrabooks (Ivy Bridge). If you’re interested in reading about benchmarks, thermals, and CPU details, and gaming performance, step inside and have a look at what AnandTech has revealed to get a glimpse of what you can expect from the next generation of Ultrabooks.

Continuing my Ultrabook game-testing, I wanted to highlight a game that’s free-to-play and worth a shot if you’re a fan of strategy-based games rather than twitch-based first-person shooters. The game in question is League of Legends [2009] which is a standalone game based on the immensely popular Defense of the Ancients mod which ran within Warcraft III [2002] and began its rise to fame in 2003. This is a multiplayer action-RPG which is highly strategic and can take some time to master. In my testing on the UX31 with Core i5 CPU, HD 3000 graphics, and 4GB of RAM, League of Legends runs flawlessly.

Read the full story

Many Ultrabooks are shipping with solid state disks (SSD) which are faster and more durable than traditional hard drive disks (HDD). The trade off is that SSDs are more expensive per GB of storage, and thus most SSD equipped Ultrabooks are equipped with a relative small amount of storage. When you’ve only got 128GB or so of storage, every gigabyte counts. In this Ultrabook Quick Tip, I’ll show you how to reclaim several gigs of storage from an unlikely place… you’re Recycle Bin (applies to both SSDs and HDDs).

Read the full story

Ultrabooks a sleek and slim by design. Unfortunately, thickness often has an inverse relationship with number of ports. For many, the Ultrabook is an attractive possibility, but not entirely practical without a decent set of ports. This is not the case for all Ultrabooks, however, and here are six solid suggestions if you need a good portfolio of ports on your Ultrabook.

Read the full story

Touchscreen Ultrabook reference design

Microsoft and Intel have made it no secret that they want to bring touchscreen computing to Windows and the x86 platform. The Windows 8 Release Preview will be made available in the first week of June, the same week that the annual Computex technology fair is being held in Taipei. The timing is unlikely coincidental. We’re likely to see the debut of market-ready touchscreen Ultrabooks running the Windows 8 Release Preview at Computex, a new Ultrabook from Dell could be among them.

Read the full story

There doesn’t appear to be any official word yet, but Tweakers.net (translated) appears to have gotten their hands on info and photos of a forthcoming business-Ultrabook from Dell, the Latitude 6430u, which will have a 14″ screen, removable battery, changeable RAM, and more. This isn’t a huge surprise given the success that Dell has reported with the XPS 13 Ultrabook.

Read the full story

Intel’s Ultrabook campaign is quite rapidly transforming what consumers can expect from a PC laptop. They’ve driven prices and weight down, and performance and features up. I’d argue that PC laptops are looking the best that they have in recent memory thanks to Intel’s Ultrabook project. But that’s just the hardware. On the software side, we’re still dealing with Windows and the same frustrations it’s shown us for several years now. Can Microsoft up the ante with Windows 8 to bring software quality in line with Ultrabook hardware? Read the full story