At the CES Unveiled event in Las Vegas this evening, Lenovo was showing off two new Ultrabook, official Ultrabook, notebooks. The U310 and U410 are said to more mainstream 13” and 14” Ultrabooks which I take to mean ‘cheaper with more storage.’ I hope this doesn’t mean the start of the end of SSD-based Ultrabooks!
Showing the motorised port access, the ports and a quick look around the device. The lighting quality was terrible at the launch event but we did what we could. Enjoy the video and look out for a better hands-on from the floor at CES over the next week.
This is the new Acer Aspire S5 Ultrabook. Looking a lot nicer than the original S3 in my opinion. There’s a good range of ports including, for the first time on an Ultrabook, Thunderbolt. All the ports are hidden behind an electrically driven raised panel.
In a brief Facebook update today Bluestacks, the company that makes an Android app ‘player’ for X86-based PCs, has alluded to an Ultrabook-related announcement at CES.
No more information has been given but it wouldn’t be wrong to consider that they might have had a bit of funding from the Intel Capital Ultrabook fund and that they’re preparing an Ultrabook-optimised Android application player (Hypervisor to give it its correct term) for Ultrabooks. Take the thought one stage further and wouldn’t it be interesting if they teamed up with Intel’s AppUp team to support application payment and download in one place. the idea has legs but may take a while to bring to fruition.
We’re on our way to CES in Las Vegas! I’m traveling out today and will arrive 20+ hours later, today, with events starting tomorrow. It’s going to be a fantastic week of Ultrabooks and alternatives and hopefuly the NP350 and Galaxy Tab, Nokia N8, Clear MiFi and Lumix FZ150 will help me keep you all up to date. (More detail on the kit i’m using is available here.)
Obviously i’ll be posting here but i’m also covering netbooks and tablets for UMPCPortal and Carrypad – at least as much as I can do!
The LG Xnote Z330 has already been announced in South Korea with confirmation that it’s coming to Europe but it looks like we’ll get our first chance at hands-on at CES next week. LG will be showing the Z330 along with a 14” version, the Z430.
I’ve had a great, although not exactly easy 2 weeks away from the desk for the Christmas period and I’m relieved to see that there wasn’t much in the way of Ultrabook news that I missed. In fact, the only real news was the availability, competitive pricing and interesting specification information for the Samsung NP530 13” Ultrabook that I discovered just minutes before Christmas Day. The Verge has a tip on a potential 14” HP Spectre Envy Ultrabook too but there’s really no information on that yet.