Ultrabooks with Intel’s new Haswell processors are here! We’ve had the Sony Vaio Duo 13 on hand and are ready to give you the full review. Is this one worth your hard earned cash? We try to answer that question inside.

LG has introduced a new Ultrabook at IFA, the Z935, packing a Haswell CPU, a high resolution screen and unusually, dual micro SD card slots.    

Sony have created a pure Ultrabook showcase with the Vaio Pro 13. It’s thin, light, powerful, stylish, touch-enabled and efficient. There’s WiDi, NFC and a fast SSD and you can add an external battery to the 37Wh pack that’s already inside. This is the Ultrabook that’s been chosen for the South Pole expedition by The Scott Expedition

The Sony Vaio Tap 11 has got an 11.6” screen which really puts it outside the ‘handheld WIndows’ category. On the other hand it weighs only 780gm, comes  with a super light, but very usable keyboard, offers full Core-level performance and has a digitizer. It is, in my opinion, a benchmark for 2013 and 2014 Haswell-based tablets.

The Sony Vaio FIT Multi-Flip is another example of some of the innovation going on in the laptop market right now. It’s the Ultrabook platform that gives designers and engineers the flexibility to build designs like this. Once again, Sony include a digitizer layer and a feature-rich product.

The Lenovo Flex 14, a ‘value’ variant of the Lenovo Yoga, starts at just 499 Euro. It’s running Haswell, has a touchscreen and a good keyboard. The battery is removable and it does this screen rotation trick. Don’t try and turn it into a tablet though because the screen only turns about 270 degrees round!

The Sony Vaio Tap 11 is, in my opinion, setting the engineering benchmark for Core-based Tablets for 2013 and most of 2014. It’s 9.9mm thick and weighs 780gm. If it was running Atom, it wouldn’t be anything new but a 1.5Ghz Core CPU is a different matter.  It’s such a step forward that I wasn’t sure whether to report this on UMPCPortal or Ultrabooknews. I took the chance to dig into the device manager at IFA today, took some pics and put together a video for you.

  Next month, Ben Saunders and Tarka L’Herpiniere will be setting out on an 1800 mile round-journey to the South Pole covering the same route as the failed 1911/1912 journey by Captain Scott. As part of that journey they will be taking part in a media challenge that no-one has attempted before. 110 days of blogging, video editing, photo posting, Facebook updating and Tweeting using two Sony Vaio Pro 13 Ultrabooks, a few solar panels and a set of Li-Ion battery packs. I had a chance to sit down with […]