In a report issued yesterday, iSuppli is predicting that 45 million SSD, cache SSD and Hyrid HDD solutions will ship for Ultrabooks and ultrathins in 2013 indicating a huge 4X jump over 2012. Isuppli is predicting that despite a contraction of the PC market but that a flattening off of interest for ‘superthins’ will ‘take-off’ in the second half of 2013.

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The Dell Inspiron 15Z Touch is here for a review (with an Nvidia GT630M GPU) and out of the blue, a Samsung Series 5 Ultra Touch (with SSD) turned up today too so as is the law around these parts, I unboxed them for you. Actually I took 15 minutes to take a good look at both and, ahem, dropped the Samsung Series 5 in the process!

Intel has announced a new Intel SSD 525 series of mSATA SSD’s which boast a number of features like AES encryption, 6 GB/s performance and a wide range of storage capacities.

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For some people it’s more important to be mobile with all-day, all-scenario capability at the expense of processing power or speed. For others, the most important thing is to be able to carry desktop power. Intel Atom and Intel Core separate these two areas of computing cleanly but how big is the difference in platform performance? I took the chance to test the Acer W510 alongside an Ultrabook convertible the Lenovo Thinkpad Twist. Both devices have strengths, and weaknesses.

A copy of this article also appears on our sister site, Ultrabooknews.

We focus on Ultrabooks here but also keep a close track on what’s happening in the ultra mobile PC space through our work with UMPCPortal. For some people it’s more important to be mobile with all-day, all-scenario capability at the expense of processing power or speed. For others, the most important thing is to be able to carry desktop power and that’s where a Core-based Utrabook comes in. But how big is the difference in platform performance? I’ve had a Atom-Clovertrail based tablet convertible for a few weeks now and so I took the chance to test it alongside an Ultrabook convertible – the Lenovo Thinkpad Twist. Both devices have strengths, and weaknesses.

There have ben some great reports on the Samsung ATIV SmartPC over the last week. Battery life looks really good and reviews are generally very positive. There was even a comparison with the Microsoft Surface over at Winsupersite that put the Windows 8 tablet out front but that  doesn’t mean it’s a perfect device. There have been complaints of lagging digitizers, troublesome keyboard dock connections and this disk speed test, just in from our friendly ATIV owner, MobileHG, shows up another area of weakness. These figures may be acceptable in a world of tablets running a mobile operating system but in the world of PCs, these sort of figures were bad even 3 years ago. See the CrystalDiskMark results below.

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We’ve only reported on three Linux-related Ultrabooks since we started Ultrabooknews. We highlighted the Novatech nfinity as a potential candidate as it was available without an OS. Then there was the Dell Sputnik project which is supposed to have been offering a product in ‘fall’ but hasn’t delivered yet. Finally there’s the complete off-the shelf solution being offered by ZaReason UltraLap 430 – an OEM design that we’re seeing under quite a few brands now. Arstechnica have gone hands-on with it and put together a review. They seem quite happy.

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Our pal Avram Piltch of LaptopMag got his hands on Acer’s new Aspire S5 Ultrabook and has an in-depth review available for your perusal. Does the S5 stand up to the competition? LaptopMag rated it 3 stars out of 5, but certainly not because of its record breaking SSD array.

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