Appearing on Geizhals.at very briefly this week were the ASUS Zenbook Prime UX31A and UX21A models. Although the resellers appear to have pulled their offerings, it’s left a trail of specs and prices behind.

Trigence Semiconductor has just received funding through the $300m Intel Capital Ultrabook fund for their DNote Audio technology. Dnote is a technology that drives analogue loudspeakers found in consumer electronics via digital signals to lower power requirements. Actually, looking at it, it seems that Trigence have developed a new speaker coil technology. Trigence, a Japansese company, will take an undisclosed sum from Intel Capital to further develop DNote Audio.

Dell may be looking to reboot it’s screen-flipping netbook in Ultrabook form. The Inspiron Duo was a netbook offering from Dell which featured interesting convertible mechanics, wherein the screen flips around right inside of the bezel, allowing the device to function as a standard clamshell or tablet device. The netbook version of this didn’t sell very well, but the convertible concept might not have died with it. With Windows 8’s vastly improved touch functionality just around the corner, we’d love to see the XPS 12 from Dell.

The ASUS Zenbook Prime UX32VD looks nice, performs well, could be a casual gamer’s dream! We’re surprised that so many 2nd-Generation ASUS Ultrabooks have found their way into the hands of reviewers. Considering the Ivy Bridge processors inside them are under NDA you would think that Intel could have kept a tighter control. Instead we’re getting reviews that don’t list CPU part numbers or CPU/GPU performance figures. There will be a huge number of updates on June 5th! Despite that, the UX32VD impresses and because the GT640M GT620M GPU isn’t under […]

Continuing my Ultrabook game-testing, I wanted to highlight a game that’s free-to-play and worth a shot if you’re a fan of strategy-based games rather than twitch-based first-person shooters. The game in question is League of Legends [2009] which is a standalone game based on the immensely popular Defense of the Ancients mod which ran within Warcraft III [2002] and began its rise to fame in 2003. This is a multiplayer action-RPG which is highly strategic and can take some time to master. In my testing on the UX31 with Core i5 […]

It feels like the Lenovo U300S is an Ultrabook that many many people had been waiting for. The first reviews were out in November last year but availability has been limited in the consumer channels, which is surprising because this isn’t a B2B product. In Europe today, just weeks before the 2nd-Generation Ultrabooks launch, there’s still a limited number of places where you can buy it, and still at original prices. Surprising, because this is a good Ultrabook. It’s not without a few issues but you’ll find out about them […]

Many Ultrabooks are shipping with solid state disks (SSD) which are faster and more durable than traditional hard drive disks (HDD). The trade off is that SSDs are more expensive per GB of storage, and thus most SSD equipped Ultrabooks are equipped with a relative small amount of storage. When you’ve only got 128GB or so of storage, every gigabyte counts. In this Ultrabook Quick Tip, I’ll show you how to reclaim several gigs of storage from an unlikely place… you’re Recycle Bin (applies to both SSDs and HDDs).

There have been a couple of Ultrabook battery-related news items in the last few months. Both, I believe, stem from what was talked about at Intel’s IDF event in Beijing. The first article highlighted how Intel introduced a standard size battery. The most recent article mentions the cylindrical 16650 type cell, a smaller version of the very common Li-Ion cell found in removable laptop battery packs. “Intel Hopes New Batteries Can Reduce Ultrabook Cost.” said the article title. Most of what is going on is summarised in this slide.