With a sleek design, powerful hardware, long battery life and a promised 'affordable' price point, the Ultrabook may very well be the direction that all notebooks are heading towards.
It was at Computex 2011 where Intel announced the Ultrabook — a new category of notebooks that would take on tablets and boost lagging sales. Intel trademarked the ‘Ultrabook’ name and came up with a reference design; minimum specifications that had to be met for a device to be called an Ultrabook. A US$ 1,000 price, a minimum battery backup of 5 hours, Intel Core i series processor, flash-based SSD storage, less than 20mm thickness and a weight of less than 1.4kg were the main criteria. This way, Intel made sure that irrespective of the manufacturer, the performance of the Ultrabook would be constant. However, there are a few drawbacks — due to the slim design, only a few ports can be accomodated and an optical drive is out of the question.
JOURNEY SO FAR
INTEL ANNOUNCED a $300 million fund for development of the Ultrabook platform (mainly to entice manufacturers to quickly adopt the specification). There are many things going for the Ultrabook — travel-friendly yet powerful, fast startup and instant resume from sleep, integrated anti-theft, identity protection and so on. To gain the first mover advantage, manufacturers rushed out Ultrabooks that met Intel's minimum requirements, without experimenting too much. The problem is, Intel's specification also included a suggested price of US$ 1,000 or less, which few could meet. Acer was the first one to launch an Ultrabook — the Aspire S3. They kept it close to the reference design with a 13.3-inch display, an Intel Core i3 processor, 4GB RAM and a regular 320GB hard drive. In this way, they managed to get the device priced at 50,000. Acer kept a separate flash memory partition for the operating system that allowed the S3 to offer the faster boot/shutdown and instant resume — as specified by Intel. Next came Lenovo with the U300s — again with a 13.3-inch display. Lenovo opted to go with a 128GB SSD for storage and 2GB RAM — again, most likely to match the US$ 1,000 price. Towards the end of 2011, other manufacturers like HP, Asus and Toshiba announced Ultrabook products for the international market. Almost all of them stuck with the 13.3-inch display (except Asus, that announced an Ultrabook with an 11.6-inch display). For Intel, it was a successful year because barely within six months of announcement, five manufacturers were shipping Ultrabooks. UPCOMING LAUNCHES
ALL MAJOR players were expected to launch their Ultrabooks during 2012 and it was evident that CES would showcase them. Over 20 new Ultrabooks were announced — each manufacturer tried to differentiate their product using design, customisation and embedded technologies. Dell showcased the XPS 13 Ultrabook with a 6mm thick body, Intel core i5/i7 processors and 100GB of cloud storage. Lenovo introduced the first enterprise-class Ultrabook, the Thinkpad T430u. This is the first to offer dedicated graphics and 1TB storage. HP’s Envy Spectre stood out by using a 14-inch display in a 13.3-inch chassis, extensive use of glass and a claimed 9-hour battery life. Samsung launched two Ultrabooks — Series 5 and Series 9 (the first Ultrabooks with 13-inch, 14-inch and 15-inch displays). Acer's Aspire S5 has a battery pack which they claim will have a life cycle three times longer than the average laptop battery.
CONCEPTS OF TOMORROW
INTEL CLAIMS that over 75 new Ultrabook designs will be launched this year. Intel’s ‘Nikishi’ concept Ultrabook, showcased at CES 2012, has a transparent glass trackpad that spans the width of the machine. It's intelligent enough to shut off when it detects that you are typing. With the lid closed, a portion of the screen is still viewable from underneath the laptop — this part doubles up as a touchscreen that utilizes Windows 8’s Metro UI to give you quick access to various useful apps. Another impressive design shown off at CES was Lenovo’s Yoga Ultrabook with a 13.3-inch touchscreen and a keyboard that swivels 360 degrees to become a stand for the screen. Intel is also working on integrating NFC and voice control in future designs. The functionality of the new designs depends heavily on Windows 8 and the Metro UI (tiled interface) — many of them should hit the market around the time when Windows 8 is ready for use.
Ultrabook Alternatives
Apple MacBook Air 56,900 onwards Credited with inspiring the Ultrabook design, the MacBook Air comes in 11.6/13.3-inch display sizes, has a 7 hour battery and weighs under 1.4kg.
Dell Inspiron 13z 37,000 onwards This 13.3-inch notebook is 9.5mm thin and weighs 1.76kg. It runs Windows 7 on 2nd generation Intel Core i3/i5 processor with 2GB RAM and 320GB hard drive.
Asus U36SD 52,000 Asus claims a 10-hour battery life with this 13.3-inch magnesiumaluminium notebook that weighs 1.44kg.
Sony Vaio S 56,000 Weighing 1.7kg, the Vaio (SB36FN) has a sturdy magnesium body, dedicated AMD graphics with 512MB RAM and a built in optical drive.
1 Lenovo U300s | 67,990 The single piece aluminium shell and even thickness throughout set it apart
2 Asus ZenBook UX31 | 89,999 Has a concentric ring pattern on the lid and measures 6mm at thinnest point
3 Acer Aspire S3 | 48,000 onwards Most affordable of the lot; starts with Core i3 processor & regular 320 HDD.
Karan Bajaj ET 23JO112
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