Producer, musician, rapper and Intel’s Director of Creative Innovation will.i.am is the centrepiece of the Ultrabook Project that launched at CES earlier this month. The project sees will.i.am taking an Ultrabook (in this phase it looks like the Toshiba Z830) to 12 city locations over the course of the year. At those location he’ll be taking part in charity activities, producing a track for the Ultrabook Project and starring in a video about each event. Part 1, Tokyo Japan, is now live.

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I finally had a chance to get a little more time with the LG Xnote Z330 this morning at Intels CES booth which, incidentally, must be 50% Ultrabook-focused. Unfortunately the LG Xnote Z330 was attached to a stand but I had a chance to look round it.

[Live session over – details removed]

Thanks to everyone that turned up at the Acer Aspire S3 Live Review this evening. It was another great detailed session of testing and Q&A. The videos are now on our YouTube channel and embedded below.

Thanks also to @morganmobile who sent his personal Acer S3 over for Ultrabooknews to test. He’s doing tests on Ultrabooks himself so make sure you follow him on Twitter to keep up with his latest thoughts.

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Our close blogging friends over at Netbooknews.de (We’ll be working closely at CES in Jan) have what must be the first hands-on report for the LG Xnote Z330 Ultrabook. It’s slim, attractive and comes in Core i5 and Core i7 versions, with a 128GB SSD. It will arrive on European shelves in Jan or Feb (Marketing talk for Feb!) for a reasonable, if not ground-breaking, price of 999 Euros. (Post-tax price.)

The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime is shaping up to be a hot seller with its quad-core Tegra 3 CPU/GPU combo and its attachable keyboard. Just a few days ago, our pal Ritchie got his hands on the Transformer Prime and produced a great overview video of the device. Now he’s drilling down the specifics.

Ritchie has fielded a number of questions from folks interested in the Transformer Prime, and prepared a whopping 5 new videos for your viewing pleasure. We’ll drop one here, but if you’d like more, certainly go visit the post over at Ritchie’s Room.

The Transformer Prime is the first tablet to be announced with the Nvidia Tegra 3 platform, and while the price and release date have yet to be officially announced, it is likely going to be in even higher demand than it’s predecessor, the Eee Pad Transformer.

Our pal Ritchie has a detailed writeup of his hands-on experience with the Transformer Prime along with some great photos to whet your appetite of this thin and powerful device. If you’re the visual type, he’s also prepared a video summary of the Transformer Prime for your enjoyment:

Ritchie says that the Super IPS+ display looks great, and this will be an upgrade over the original Transformer’s regular IPS display, while retaining the durable Gorilla Glass. Asus added a display brightness boosting function to the Transformer Prime which is intended for better viewing during outside use.

Tegra 3’s performance is also in full force; it appears as though it can handle 720p and 1080p video with no problems. That could make the Transformer Prime a great portable home-theater (thanks to the micro-HDMI port), with the only problem being the relatively weak Android codec support. I’m curious to know how well the Transformer Prime can handle software video decoding that comes along with some third-party applications.

The unit itself is slimmer and lighter than the iPad 2, and attached with the keyboard, the Transformer Prime is rated to run for 18 hours which is pretty awesome.

For more detail about the Transformer Prime, don’t miss Ritchie’s write-up.

Unless there are any unforseen issues leading up to it’s launch, the Transformer Prime is certainly setting the new bar for Android tablets, and I would go as far to say that Apple better pay attention as well. The Transformer Prime has nearly everything one could want in a tablet today except for a little Ice Cream Sandwich action.

‘HDR mobile computing’ is how I would neatly define the Ultrabook category. These surprisingly powerful laptops can work as efficiently as a netbook and then when you need the power, kick-in cores, turbo and other special features to give you a truly all-round solution that includes video editing, gaming and care-free desktop-style working. The Asus UX21 is one of the lightest, smallest and yet, most powerful of the Ultrabooks, at least in the Core i7 1.8Ghz version we have here. We’re impressed with what’s inside and with its weight and style but there are a couple of potential showstoppers for some people. Read-on to find out more in our detailed multimedia review of the ASUS Zenbook UX21E. Thanks ASUS Germany for the review sample.

Those of you that are considering the Lenovo U300s should check this good video review out. Ultimately, the UX31 is regarded as better than the U300S, even where the trackpad is concerned. I was surprised.
Screen brightness and battery life are also said to be better on the UX31 although Mobile Tech Review do regard the U300S as a good Ultrabook all-round with a solid build, full size HDMI and a good Centrino WiFi card.

The choice is yours but if you need to wait for another opinion and even a live review and Q&A session, stay tuned here because we are close to securing the UX31, U300s and the Z830 for detailed testing at Ultrabooknews.

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