Haswell powered Ultrabooks are continuing to enter the market and a newly introduced model from Asus, the 13″ Vivobook S301 has been reviewed by Ultrabookreview.com with a few interesting features.

What can the new Intel Haswell HD 4400 graphics manage? That’s what I wanted to find out. Aside from our usual slew of benchmarks, which we’ll be showing in our forthcoming Sony Vaio Duo 13 review, I wanted to find out how games felt with HD 4400. So I fired up two classics, Minecraft (2011) and World of Warcraft (2004), to see how Haswell managed.

Backing up DVDs is an important topic for many people. Transferring the DVD to a portable format isn’t easy though and can take a lot of time. My daughter is away this weekend and I thought it would be nice for her to be able to watch some of her DVDs on her PC while she’s away. Her netbook, tablet and smartphone don’t have DVD drives (although the netbook has a DVD playback license) so there’s only one thing possible – transfer them to a portable digital format. I’ve tested three generations of Ultrabook with a very simple DVD backup process and the results are below.

The Lenovo Yoga 11S Ultrabook convertible is an 11.6-inch version of the Yoga 13, with one important difference — it’s running an Ivy Bridge ‘1.5’ processor, the Intel Core i7-3689Y. This new processor was created by Intel to meet the demand for small Windows tablets ahead of the Haswell launch. We’ve got the Yoga 11S on hand and will be putting it through the paces over the next few weeks. For now we’ve got our initial impressions and photos for your perusal.

Samsung are launching, as I type, the Samsung ATIV Book Q…

A hybrid with another completely new design, QuadHD+ (3200×1800) and weighing 1.2KG. Based on Haswell (Core i5 4200U with HD 4400 is confirmed as one of the options.)

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Computex 2013 has seen a few announcements already for new Haswell Ultrabooks and Gigabyte is also getting in on the action with a range of Ultrabooks with the new chip and discrete graphics as well.

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Despite the name, iRacing is not for iOS devices. Actually it’s quite the opposite — iRacing is a realistic racing simulator on PC for hardcore fans of the racing genre. The game, which has typically relied on wheel or joystick input, has been updated for tilt and touch control by Ultrabooks with built-in sensors. iRacing developer David Tucker walks us through the dev process.

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The first wave of Ultrabooks brought sleek, sexy laptops to the masses. The second wave increased performance and power savings. And now, in the latter half of the second wave, and approaching the third wave, things are getting really interesting. Intel’s Ultrabook project has stimulated the creation of the most exciting laptops in recent memory. They’re calling them Ultrabook Convertibles — and I can’t wait to get one.

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