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.
At GDC 2013, developers of the popular video transcoding software, Handbrake, announced that they will support Intel’s QuickSync technology on all Intel processors that support it, which includes Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, and forthcoming Haswell. If you’ve got an Ultrabook, you’ve got QuickSync. The tech allows developers to tap into hardware acceleration on Intel Core CPUs. The result is significantly increased speeds for video rendering and transcoding.
The Asus Transformer Book is slowly trickling out into the wild and UltrabookReview.com have got their hands on one and have posted both a video and extensive written review of the elusive UltraBook which should help ease the wait till it hits retail in adequate quantities.
Is the wait almost over? The question about when the Lenovo Helix would be made available looks to be getting clearer and may be answered in a few short weeks, at least for US buyers according to the official Lenovo twitter account.
I’ll be the first to admit that I cringe a little inside when I see brand new laptops released in 2013 with 1366×768 displays. It seems like a real shame — many of these devices are beautiful machines but have a resolution that would have felt at home at least 5 years ago. For those looking for a crisp high resolution display there’s good news! The Ultrabook segment is home to at least 16 Ultrabooks with full HD 1920 x 1080p displays — in all shapes and sizes!
The MSI S20 is a remarkably elusive device. Chippy tracked it down for a hands-on at CeBIT 2013 this week. We first learned about this appealing looking Ultrabook convertible 9 months ago — back in June 2012. We knew we’d be waiting until at least the launch of Windows 8 in October of 2012 before the official release date, but here we are several months after that and the MSI S20 still isn’t widely available.
The offerings in the Ultrabook category have been growing steadily since second-gen Ivy Bridge devices started hitting the market. With this growth comes new screen sizes that deviate from the typical 13.3-inch ‘baseline’ Ultrabook. To my surprise, I’ve watched many manufacturers increasingly launch larger, not smaller, Ultrabooks. We ran a poll back in May of 2012 asking what your ideal screen size was. I was surprised to find that more of you were interested in a 14-inch Ultrabook than a more portable 11.6-inch unit. Now that the market has seeded 14-inch and even 15-inch Ultrabooks, do you still want larger Ultrabooks?
Intel has made speed a big priority in Ultrabooks from the beginning. Instead of continuing the race-to-the-bottom that was the netbook, Intel wanted to pack premium components into sleek laptops. With the first generation, Intel made sure that every Ultrabook included Rapid Start, among other technologies, which cut resume times from something like 10-15 seconds down to 3-4 seconds. With even more performance in the second generation of Ultrabooks, Intel is now passing the threshold into ‘instant-on’ Ultrabooks.
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