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.

As I tool a look at the MSI booth at CeBIT yesterday I couldn’t stop myself from getting a little hands-on with the WindPad 110W. AMD Fusion-based and equiped with a nice optical mouse pointer and full SD card slot it’s a tablet design that could rally benefit from the next-gen OS and platforms.

The MSI rep nods and smiles and I talk about 1366×768 and Windows 8, as we discuss the reason for having a mouse pointer in a 1KG tablet and how Windows 8 + Clover Trail W with a fast SSD could really bring usable low-cost productive tablets to end-users.

MSI won’t say anything about new products but they’re clearly thinking about this. In tact, I got the impression that they’re more interested in Windows tablets than in Ultrabooks which they tell me are not going to be broguth to the market until they have taken a longer term look at the Ultrabook market.

It’s a blast from 2011 to play with the WindPad again but I think that we’re going to see more of this later this year. Tablets, convertibles and, my favorite, the detachable Atom-powered Win8/Android screen and Intel Core-driven keyboard base station, all in under 1.5KG!

At the Acer press event at CeBIT today we heard about the S5, the levitating Ultrabook!

It’s still the ‘thinnest in the world’ and still 15mm thick but we did manage to confirm some specs and get a little look at the device manager.

At the moment it’s being marketed as a 2nd-gen Core Ultrabook but it’s clear that unless Intel have some more, major delays on Ivy Bridge production that it will launch as a 2nd-generation Ultrabook with 3rd-generation Core CPU.

More images, along with the hands-on video, below. DOn’t forget to check the related posts below for information from CES.

Intel didn’t hold back on pulling together an Ultrabook stage show at CeBIT this week. In a pre-opening walk-about we found a hall area packed with every Ultrabook that’s available in Europe right now.

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I’m in Hannover, Germany, for CeBit and as I start this article, Sascha Pallenberg of Netbooknews.com is sitting on the other side of our ‘blog apartment’ watching the Windows 8 consumer preview keynote from Mobile World Congress last week. A few evenings ago I was testing Windows 8 on an Atom-based tablet and while all that has been happening I’ve been thinking about Cover Trail W,  the ultra-mobile platform that Intel have built to run Windows 8.  In dual-core 1.8Ghz build with an SSD and 2GB of RAM I think we’ll have a winner on our hands when it comes to a platform. We can only hope that manufacturers see the potential for new form factors with this platform and operating system combo.

While the ARM-based platforms are approaching the same processing power band as we see on the high-end Atom platforms (Qualcomm’s Snapdragon is looking particularly impressive in terms of dual-core performance) they won’t contain the full goodness of Windows from day one. By that I mean you won’t be able to pick up an ARM-based Windows 8 platform and be able to download and install your favorite desktop apps. Clover Trail “W, on the other hand, is a full X86 PC platform and will act like an Ultrabook or a desktop PC and I believe that Windows 8 will be able to pull some impressive low-power usage figures out of the platform. From what I’ve seen in my testing and listening between the lines to what Intel has to say about Windows 8, it will definitely be ‘Clover Trail aware.’

In my testing of Windows 8 Beta this week I was getting those old ultra mobile PC and modular computing feelings back again. Windows 8 is likely to be the first usable ‘smartbook’ operating system on the market. Android always looks great in demos on the ASUS Transformer Prime but there’s a long road ahead in terms of filling the gaps for productivity workers. There’s a Prime sitting on the desk to the right of me now but this article is being written on a Samsung NP350 which is faster, cheaper, and more productive.

I’ll be looking for more information on Windows 8 and Clover Trail W this week. We’ve seen a demo device or two behind glass but maybe now that the public preview is available, manufacturers won’t be so shy with the Windows 8 letting us have hands-on.

Is there any big Windows 8 questions that you think need answering?

The last week has been pretty poor in terms of Ultrabook news. There’s been some discussion about sales numbers and prices (again!), some discussion about the MacBook Air (again) and some discussion about the Transformer Prime as it relates to Ultrabooks (e.g. here and here. Update: Similar here.) I saw a major online PC magazine pump out a raft of generic Ultrabook articles for Google to trawl and to top it off, Lenovo said they couldn’t send us a U300s for testing. Thank goodness Daniel sent us his U300s owner review!

Yesterday’s top Ultrabook theme was the Intel ‘Pop-Up Theater’ Ultrabook video which I thought was cute, but a little weak. Done in the ‘flashmob’ style it felt a like a poor attempt at a viral campaign that copies too much from other set-ups we’ve seen before. It was obviously heavily edited and didn’t really tell anyone about what the Ultrabook was. The Popup Theatre website has 233 tweets and 469 Facebook likes as I write which will grow over time but seems middle-of-the-road; echoing the production.

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You know what you want in an Ultra Mobile Computing solution. You want a rich spectrum of quality desktop applications with security, flexibility and processing power wrapped up into a handheld device. Unfortunately, after a busy CES, your options remain limited.

Computing at CES this year was all about Ultrabooks and Ice Cream Sandwich and while both of these topics are interesting, neither of the sectors produced anything that can be used today as a handheld PC.

Android devices continue to be crippled by low-quality and restricted software despite some amazing hardware solutions. The ASUS transformer Prime shows what can be done but is the same disappointment as the ‘smartbook’ devices I was testing in 2010. Just try using the Web Browser for a suite of web-based apps, try to write an article in the web-based WordPress back-end or try to book a flight. It’s actually quite embarrassing to see how little the software has moved on. Look for an office suite, a set of security tools, audio and video tools and a good quality image library and editing suite. It seems the only thing the Android ecosystem is working on today is gaming and that’s largely because of the attention that Nvidia have managed to drum up for the Tegra platform.

The fact is that the number of Android tablets out there doesn’t translate into any sort of business-case for porting and developing quality apps. Why bother investing $200K in a high-quality application port for a 7 inch or 10 inch screen when the market is an estimated 20 million customers and the average app purchase cost is under $4. The risk is not worth taking.

What the Android market needs is a huge boost in numbers. Fortunately, the Kindle Fire and the newly announced Asus Eee Pad Memo with Android 4.0 operating system and a price of $250 could help. Although the Kindle Fire only runs V2.x Android software the chances are that newer versions of the Amazon product will get an upgrade and boost the ICS customer base. The Eee Pad Memo at $250 speaks for itself. By the end of 2012 I estimate there will be well over 50 million Android tablets in the market and the numbers will be accelerating. At that point it makes sense to sit down with your developers and talk about an Android tablet application, albeit for a 2013 launch.

As I look across the other platforms and operating systems, I don’t see any major solutions rising up. The iPad continues to dominate mobile productivity apps but the form factor and operating system flexibility are limiting. The current Windows/Oaktrail pairing is disappointing too in terms of both battery life and performance.

Intel held up the next-gen 32nm, re-architected ‘Clover Trail’ Windows tablet platform at CES which could provide the best chance of a quality handheld Windows experience and with Windows 8, this is probably the one to watch out for. Clover Trail is due in the second half of the year.

Cedar Trail netbooks and tablets provide an intermediate solution though and with the EeePC X101CH coming in cheap and light, it might be something to look at more closely but if you’re really looking for a handheld solution, I just can’t give you any news right now.

We’re at Mobile World Congress next month and at CeBIT in March so with Windows 8 looming, there’s a chance that UMPCPortal will come alive again. In the meantime, I can only advise buying a 7 inch Android 4.0 tablet and experimenting as soon as you can. While it can be frustrating for productivity, there’s a whole lot of good stuff that can still be done and I’m still not going anywhere without my Samsung Galaxy Tab. Paired with an Ultrabook, it’s a great solution.