In 2007 Microsoft introduced 7 inch tablets based on low power CPUs and Windows with touch capability and an overlay user interface called the Origami Experience. The Origami UMPCs drove a huge amount of attention at launch but within 4 years all traces of the devices were gone from the market.

Yesterday Microsoft introduced 10 inch tablets based on low power CPUs and Windows with touch capability and an overlay user interface called Metro. The Surface has already driven a huge amount of attention, but will it last?

What’s the difference and should we be more excited this time round?

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John Taylor, Director of Global Product Marketing at AMD, just published an official post over at the AMD blog entitled: ‘Does an Ultrabook™ by any other name smell as sweet?’ In it, Taylor takes issue with Intel’s Ultrabook campaign and wishes that Intel would let OEMs alone to make their own decisions.

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Many Ultrabooks are shipping with solid state disks (SSD) which are faster and more durable than traditional hard drive disks (HDD). The trade off is that SSDs are more expensive per GB of storage, and thus most SSD equipped Ultrabooks are equipped with a relative small amount of storage. When you’ve only got 128GB or so of storage, every gigabyte counts. In this Ultrabook Quick Tip, I’ll show you how to reclaim several gigs of storage from an unlikely place… you’re Recycle Bin (applies to both SSDs and HDDs).

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Intel’s Ultrabook campaign is quite rapidly transforming what consumers can expect from a PC laptop. They’ve driven prices and weight down, and performance and features up. I’d argue that PC laptops are looking the best that they have in recent memory thanks to Intel’s Ultrabook project. But that’s just the hardware. On the software side, we’re still dealing with Windows and the same frustrations it’s shown us for several years now. Can Microsoft up the ante with Windows 8 to bring software quality in line with Ultrabook hardware? Read the full story

There was a brief report a few days ago that hinted at new Celeron CPUs being offered for Ultrabook products. I don’t believe it. Not only does this source appear on my personal ‘blacklist’ but there are good reasons why this report is wrong.

Update: The news item was updated with a response from Intel. We were right, Celeron CPUs are not going into Ultrabooks.

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Lately we’ve been getting asked, “should I buy an Ultrabook now or wait for Ivy Bridge?”. Here I’d like to give my recommendation to help out those who might be ready to pull the trigger on an Ultrabook purchase.

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A lot has been said about Ivy Bridge, the 3rd generation Intel Core compute platform and the platform that will go into the 2nd Generation of Ultrabooks. Although the CPU core remains largely the same as in the ‘Sandy Bridge’ platform, it’s going to be manufactured with the next generation process at 22nm. That means lower power usage and more space for other goodness on the die and that’s exactly what Intel have done. They’ve taken the opportunity to vastly improve the graphics and media subsystem. You’ll hear about ‘70%’ improvements on the GPU which relates to gaming graphics. Early tests have shown that where modern game frame-rates were in the 10-20fps range, they may now reach above the all-important 30fps figure and include DirectX11 support which brings the Ultrabook right into mainstream gaming. In this article though I want to talk about the other features on the GPU that relate to media. For many people they may be more important than 3D gaming frame rates.

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Floppy drives are dead and the computer industry seems to have its sights set on the CD drive as the next victim. The vast majority of Ultrabooks ship without an optical drive, and as someone now using an Ultrabook as my primary computer, I can tell you that I’m honestly no missing it. There seems to be little room, or little need, for an optical drive in an Ultrabook.

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