Floppy drives are dead and the computer industry seems to have its sights set on the CD drive as the next victim. The vast majority of Ultrabooks ship without an optical drive, and as someone now using an Ultrabook as my primary computer, I can tell you that I’m honestly no missing it. There seems to be little room, or little need, for an optical drive in an Ultrabook.

The Clevo W110ER  shows how far high-power portable laptops have come but also shows the trade-off between the Ultrabook platform and a standard notebook computing platform. Ultrabooks are unlikely to reach this level of performance in 2012; This level of processing power won’t reach Ultrabook sizes and weights!

  Releasing a 1st-generation Ultrabook while the excitement builds to 2nd-gen Ultrabooks based on Ivy Bridge may, at first, seem a stupid move but when it’s a unique product like the new LuvBook X from Mouse Computers in Japan, it may not make much difference. The LuvBook X is going to be the second 11.6” Ultrabook on the market, the first with a carbon-fiber body and the first to break 1KG.

Engadget China have the first pics of the new, Ivy Bridge Ultrabooks from Asus. As tipped by us in Feb, the two models include full-HD displays. There’s a backlit keyboard too. Asus are calling the new Zenbook the Zenbook Prime and it’s tipped for June availability. The report doesn’t specifically mention the UX31A and UX21A but given previous reports and matching specifications, I’ll go out on a limb and say they’re one and the same.  The article doesn’t mention Ivy Bridge either but do we really need to consider Sandy […]

It hasn’t been long since HP officially launched the HP Folio 13 Ultrabook and the Envy Spectre 14 Ultrabook, but it seems that they’re already working on successors so these devices. Uncovered in a thread over at NotebookReview forum was some internal HP communiqué indicating two new additions to HP’s ‘EVNY’ line, the Envy 4, and Envy 6. Evidence thus far suggests that these two new models will be Ultrabooks, likely using the current-generation Sandy Bridge platform along with discrete graphics from AMD.

Computex, Taiwan, is one of the most important trade shows for the laptop market and this year it coincides with the availability of low-power Ivy Bridge CPUs for Ultrabooks so it makes sense that Intel and their customers seize the moment to launch the 2nd Generation of Ultrabooks. In an article at Techworld.com, Scott Pendrey, desktop product manager at Intel, gives us the information that “the first ultrabooks featuring Ivy Bridge processors will come to market on 5 June, with more to follow throughout 2012.”

If you’ve got an Ultrabook, it likely has either integrated Intel HD 3000 graphics or discrete Nvidia GeForce graphics. Recently we gave you 6 excellent game suggestions for your Ultrabook. Now we’ve got a suggestion to make sure your Ultrabook is running those games as well as possible. One of the best ways to keep the graphical capabilities of your Ultrabook performing at maximum capacity is to ensure that you’re using the latest driver for your graphics card. Intel and Nvidia regularly update their GPU drivers to address bugs and […]

German computer manufacturer Medion has taken wraps off the Akoya S4611 “high performance” Ultrabook. Shown off at the Gadget Show Live in Birmingham, UK, the Akoya S4611 features a 14″ screen (resolution not yet specified) and can be equipped, according to Medion, with up to 1TB of HDD storage space and up to 16GB of RAM. It’s not clear at the moment whether or not the unit is sealed — which would prevent after-market user-upgrades of the HDD or RAM. The Ultrabook will be available with the current-gen Intel Core […]