The MSI S20 is a remarkably elusive device. Chippy tracked it down for a hands-on at CeBIT 2013 this week. We first learned about this appealing looking Ultrabook convertible 9 months ago — back in June 2012. We knew we’d be waiting until at least the launch of Windows 8 in October of 2012 before the official release date, but here we are several months after that and the MSI S20 still isn’t widely available.

North Cape is the Haswell hybrid Ultrabook reference design that was brought out as the demo at CES in Jan. This evening in Hannover, Intel have allowed us to have a few minutes hands-on with it at CeBIT. Naturally this is a reference design and not a final product but from the few minutes we had we can draw at least a few conclusions. I also had a chance to speak to a senior marketing representative from Intel about Connected Standby.

Fujitsu launched the E733 laptop today and I took a closer look at CeBIT today. The video below shows you round the high-end features like modular accessory slot, smart card reader, particle filter, fingerprint reader and and a huge battery.

It’s always nice to review an Ultrabook that’s well-balanced and good value for money. The Toshiba U940 was one. The Samsung Series 5 (Sandy Bridge) was another. Does the Samsung Series 5 with touch, Windows 8 and SSD, have the same values? Read-on to find out.

Although we’ve had hints and tips that the ground-breaking Connected Standby feature is coming to the next generation of Ultrabooks it wasn’t until a recent interview that Intel really confirmed that it was coming. At Intel’s Developer Forum in Beijing in April Intel will offer a deep-dive into the feature.

Let this be a lesson to all of us. The Fujitsu Q702 I am testing right now has a 1.8Ghz Core i5 CPU with Turbo Boost Technology that can take it to 2.6Ghz. The whole thing is packed inside a tablet PC. Impressive. The problem is that this 1.8Ghz platform down-clocks itself from 1.8Ghz  to an average 1.3Ghz when under load. Fujitsu don’t appear to be telling their customers either.

The MSI S30 is a forthcoming Ultrabook alternative (falling into the more general ‘ultrathin’ category). Though we’ve been eyeing up the 11.6-inch S20 Ultrabook convertible for some time, it looks like the S-series from MSI will consist of both Ultrabook and non-Ultrabook devices. The S30 is a 13.3-inch ultrathin that uses hardware similar to what you’ll find in an Ultrabook, but doesn’t quite fit Intel’s Ultrabook definition — the trade-off being that the S30 will likely be less expensive.

Temash is AMD’s new computing platform aimed at Windows 8 tablets. Recently they teased some interesting docking functionality in which you could dock a Temash tablet onto a keyboard for a 40% processing power boost which is an idea that we’d love to see explored in the computing industry. Chippy has been on the show-floor of Mobile World Congress 2013 this week and got to check out Temash prototypes at the AMD booth.