Ultrabooks set to steal the show at CES

Ultrabooks – slim, portable high-powered notebooks – are expected to soak up the limelight at CES 2012. 

|
Reuters
A Lenovo ultrabook is shown at an event in November. Ultrabooks – slim, portable high-powered notebooks – are expected to steal the show at this year's CES.

First it was laptops. Then it was netbooks. Then it was tablets.

Now it is "ultrabooks" – a term introduced and trademarked by Intel to describe a slim, portable, high-powered PC. (In a nice analysis of the ultrabook, Ina Fried of All Things Digital jokes that she has another name for the devices. "I call them laptops," she writes.) And according to an array of reports from tech analysts, ultrabooks are set to dominate the show at this year's CES, an annual technology gala staged in Las Vegas

Among the ultrabooks expected to be unveiled at CES are models from manufacturers such as Toshiba, Dell, Acer, Asus, and HP. Still confused about the actual purpose of an ultrabook?

Think the MacBook Air, running Windows. Think small, light, and powerful.

So how will the ultrabooks end up performing on the electronics market? Over at Computerworld, Barbara Krasnoff advises a wait-and-see attitude. 

"I'm not so much a skeptic – the idea of a slim, lightweight, comfortable-to-type-on full-featured notebook with a very long battery life is extremely attractive – as I am cautious," Krasnoff writes. "The current crop of the first ultrabooks to make their appearance are attractive, but according to a review that Computerworld's Brian Nadel did of the Acer Aspire S3 and Asus Zenbook UX31, they aren't yet quite the wonders that we'd like."

Krasnoff also points out – correctly – that most of the ultrabooks debuting at CES hover in the $1,000 range, which is well out of the range of the casual consumer (but, of course, in the same range as the MacBook Air). "One of the factors that drove the netbook into almost immediate popularity a couple of years ago was that you could pick up one of the small, lightweight systems for about $400, more or less," Krasnoff notes. 

On a related note, if tech-savvy consumers have already shelled out for a smartphone (typical price: 200 bucks, with a 2-year contract), and a tablet ($500, let's say), will they really have the wallet capacity for an ultrabook? Well, yes, maybe, says David Johnson, an analyst at Forrester. 

"While the ultrabooks are thin, light and offer instant-on convenience, the tablet will still have a place in the computer bag for reading, reviewing documents, and informal discussions or presentations," Johnson told Wired. 

For more tech news, follow us on Twitter @venturenaut. And don’t forget to sign up for the weekly BizTech newsletter.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Ultrabooks set to steal the show at CES
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/Horizons/2012/0105/Ultrabooks-set-to-steal-the-show-at-CES
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe