“Intel to Showcase Ultrabook™ Convertibles with Touch, Tablets and Phones at CES 2013” is the title of the media information post that’s just gone out from in relation to the CES trade show running from Jan 8-11 in Las Vegas. Clearly the big push is still with Ultrabooks.
As in previous years there will be a media preview on Day 0, the press day, and a showcase at 7am, an hour before the show starts on the 8th. Kirk Staugen will be giving an update on Ultrabooks based the 3rd (current) Generation of Intel Core along with information on ‘future technologies.’ We’d expect a Haswell-based mock-up and a few battery life and performance specs to be thrown around in the press event.
What we know so far about Haswell CPU, GPU, Media, power and availability.
Alongside the Ultrabook Convertibles [hey, what about the good old basic Ultrabook, Intel?] we’ll be seeing tablets and phones so expect a lot of the CloverTrail tablets that haven’t been available so far to get a second-launch. You’ll probably hear about the next-generation of Atom which undergoes a big architecture change this time round.
We’re hoping to be on-location when it happens but whatever happens, you can be sure of all the news and expert analysis here at Ultrabooknews.
The push for convertibles is long overdue. It should have happened in CES2012.
In fact, I think it’s just a matter of time before:
“Ultrabook” = “Laptop” + “tablet-mode” + “touch” + “thin” + “lightweight”
They might as well have named thin & light touch-enabled convertibles as “Ultrabooks” in the first place so that consumers can easily identify it from “notebooks”.
The fundamental differences of Windows 8, and the required hardware, was already plain to see back in Q4 2011. Upgrading Win7 to Win8 is totally different then from Vista/XP to Win 7: Different hardware is required to take full advantage and make sense of Win8, and tech-savvy people had been doing “wait-and-see” with their device purchases for the whole year.
It seems to me the delayed push mislead large parts of the PC industry to think they can keep making & selling the conventional notebooks in 2012. It makes me angry to see that, over a year after Win8 Developer Preview, and a month into the Win8 launch, the rather well-known “Sham Shui Po Computer Shopping centre” in Hong Kong (Translate:A geek’s heaven and the go-to place for PC-related things in Hong Kong) still only got one or two truely Win8-ready models on display, out of the 50+ shops there! They are still displaying Win7 models, some of them have Win8 installed, but no touchscreen to make sense of the strange new UI. I guess no one ever told these shops that the Win7 stock they bought at normal price from suppliers two months ago will be so hard to move now as consumers gets to know Win8 more each day. I am worried these win7 stock will be the end for some of these shops after Christmas.
Perhaps if the convertible push had happened in CES2012, interest in the PC market would be sustained by exciting new form-factors for much of the year, Magazine reviews would have a lot to write by testing these machines with Win8 Consumer Preview, Geeks will be totting around Win8CP ultrabooks, and the public will have started the thinking & educating process of comparing Win8 convertibles to Android/iOS Tablets. Then when Win8 launch, it will be the final piece to complete the puzzle and therefore eagerly anticipated. 2012 could have been such an interesting year!