Asus has become one of the first (if not the first) PC manufacturers to announce an Ultrabook with an Intel Haswell CPU, the VivoBook 551, and along with the new silicone the new PC also packs some other features.

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Asus loves their teaser videos. Last week they put out a teaser about their forthcoming appearance at the annual Computex conference in Taipei, Taiwan. There’s not much to go on except for their slogan ‘We Transform’. With their commitment to convertible designs over the last year, we expect to see more of the same (a good thing). This time around, expect thinner and lighter devices with better battery life thanks to Intel’s forthcoming Haswell processors.

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Here’s a way to check for battery capacity on a Windows 10 laptop, and to view historical battery life reports. without installing any 3rd party apps. It’s built right into Windows 10 and it takes just a minute to get the battery information. If you’re thinking about buying a second-hand laptop, this is one of the commands you need to use before you buy!

In general, people don’t like sliders that much but when we tested the Sony Vaio Duo 11 recently we were really impressed by it’s ability as a pen-driven slate in easel mode. Sony might be ready to offer a larger version of the hybrid Ultrabook if a leaked video is anything to go by and we think it could be a Haswell-based 3rd-gen Ultrabook.

Occasionally, like every business, we update our plans and predictions to make sure we’re on the right course.  We’ve just done that for the Ultrabook sector and from what we can see there’s a lot of potential in 2013 for Ultrabooks to rise to the levels of sales that netbooks had three years ago – an ecosystem that many were happy to be in.  There’s potential for more in 2014 too as the Ultrabook moves into its third generation. This will be the Ultrabook that Intel wanted to make from day one and is the only Ultrabook iteration that should be used to evaluate the segment. We’re positive that prices, performance, style, battery life, operating system and form factors will impress customers and developers to make the upgrade in 2013 and that we’ll see an impressive sales spike later in the year.

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At GDC 2013, Intel announced that their next-gen Haswell graphics will support a new bit of tech called PixelSync as well as DirectX 11.1. PixelSync on Hawell graphics enables two rendering techniques called ASVM and AOIT which can cost a standard GPU up to 80% of it’s performance but runs smoothly with Haswell’s integrated graphics. The developers behind Grid 2 are using Haswell’s new tech to bring graphically rich games to the masses.

Always-on is the a feature you’ll find with Connected Standby-capable Windows 8 PCs.

Some people think they don’t need it. Let me explain why you need it.

Connected Standby (or Always On, Always Connected AOAC) is the mark of a ground-breaking new category of PCs that will not only be always-on capable but will have hardware that is so efficient that it will completely change what you think is good battery life.

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CES 2013 is all over for another year.  We weren’t there but thanks to live streams, press releases and news from other sites we were able to relay all the important news for you and had the time to add a little more analysis that we would have done had we been there.

In the Ultrabook space 7 new products were shown and 7 products got an update and there was a lot of related technology news.  Read on for the 23 most important Ultrabook-related news items of CES 2013.

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