Air Gestures, facial analysis, object tracking, advanced voice recognition, touch and Ultrabooks. It’s all in the Ultimate Coder Challenge where 7 teams are building showcase applications on a Lenovo Yoga 13 that will demonstrate the sort of interaction capability that could be built into a Ultrabook in the future. I’m involved with the judging of the Ultimate Coder event and every week you’ll find an update from me as I analyse the teams progress. This is week 1. The teams have started their journey and have all published some interesting […]

There’s no question that the Acer W510 is now stable enough, has huge amounts of battery power and is portable enough to be a real advantage for a mobile blogger but is it good enough in other departments, namely CPU, storage and keyboard? Can this 1300gm dockable do the business? [Update below] The Acer W510 is an Intel Clovertrail-based tablet with docking keyboard and battery. Not only is the tablet very efficient at running Windows 8 but there’s a total of 60Wh of battery in total, equivalent to a good […]

The Dell Inspiron 15Z is positioned quite nicely in terms of most of its specifications, its price and its quality but there are one or two specifications that could hit some customers hard. We’ve taken a long hard look at the Dell Inspiron 15Z, enjoyed a bit of Batman Arkham City, and put a full review together for you.

Would you know it, after our latest look at the 9-month MIA status of the Transfomer Book Ultrabook, reader Carten Kring points out that a Transformer Book unboxing has appeared on YouTube. The video appears to be of a retail unit and was uploaded by reseller Conrad.de who lists the availability of the unit on the 18th of next month, a date which jives with our recent findings.

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 […]

Back in June of 2012 Asus unveiled the Transformer Book, a (at the time) unique Ivy Bridge Ultrabook convertible with dockable keyboard. The Transformer Book created quite a bit of excitement and interest as a device that could function as both a tablet and a powerful Ultrabook laptop. We knew we’d have to wait until the launch of Windows 8 before the unit came to market. But when that date, October 2012, came and passed, we started to worry about the Transformer Book. Now, 9 months after its original announcement, we’re wondering if the […]

Here’s some information about how you can access a very cool battery life report on Windows, check your connected standby figures and potentially fix your problem. I hope you take the time to contribute your report or thoughts in the comments below too.

While Ultrabooks generally perform to similar efficiencies under load there’s quite a difference when it comes to near-idle operations and that can seriously impact the length of time you can use an Ultrabook as an offline word processor. As a blogger that’s a very important scenario for me and I suspect that if you’re offline and answering a bunch of emails or writing a presentation or report, this scenario is important to you too. If you choose the right Ultrabook you can get 10 hours of typing on one battery […]