ultrabook

What's an ultrabook, exactly? Is it a slim, portable 13-incher, or any laptop that's thinnish and cool-looking? The latest confounding trend in Intel's "ultrabook" brand creep has been the rise of 14- and 15-inch laptops boasting thinner designs and those same low-voltage CPUs that smaller ultrabooks have. Call them the return of the thin-and-light laptop, if you will, but ultrabooks have finally gotten supersized.… Read more

Joining us this week is David Carnoy, who brings a collection of his favorite iPad 3 cases to show off. We also get hands-on with a too-big ultrabook, and debate the future of this once-promising new category.

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A new model in Hewlett-Packard's Folio 13 series is available at Wal-Mart for $100 less than the standard HP price, making one of the most highly rated ultrabooks to date also one of the least expensive.

The online Wal-Mart price is $798, about $100 less than the standard model on HP's Web site.

Wal-Mart's SKU uses a 1.4GHz Intel Core i3-2367M processor compared to the higher-end 1.6GHz Intel Core i5-2467M chip in the $899 model on HP's site.

Everything else is pretty much the same, including 4GB of memory and a 128GB solid state … Read more

commentary Well, it was fun while it lasted.

The personal computer industry backed a promising candidate in the ultrabook concept, convincing even a skeptic like myself that a new class of superslim, superlight laptops was the key to exciting consumers. Ultrabooks were well on their way to becoming the PC form factor of the future.

And now, it's already over.

In record time -- something less than six months -- the ultrabook term has become so overused and amorphous that it's well on its way to being useless. … Read more

Nvidia mobile chief Rene Haas laid out in an interview with CNET some of the device choices Windows 8 shoppers may face this fall. Inside some, Nvidia snuggles up next to Intel. In others, Nvidia and Intel are worlds apart.

Nvidia is in a unique position because it offers chips that land in devices in two giant markets: Windows-Intel and ARM--the latter's chip designs power virtually every smartphone and tablet on the planet.

For Windows-Intel, Nvidia's mobile focus is laptops. There, Nvidia will supply its latest power-efficient graphics processing units (GPUs), the 640M and 620M--formally announced today … Read more

Are you ready for large-screen ultrabooks? Well, hopefully the answer's "yes," because they're coming to stores whether you like it or not. The differentiating factors on what constituted an ultrabook -- thin, portable, power efficient, SSD, no optical drive, lack of dedicated "high-end" graphics, longer battery life -- have started to go out the window. Witness the 15-inch Samsung Series 9 and HP Envy 14 Spectre, for starters.

As far as the Acer Aspire Timeline Ultra M3-581TG is concerned, it may make you question your entire perception of the category. DVD drive? Check. Dedicated high-end Nvidia graphics? Check. Larger hard drive options? Check. Portable? Well, not exactly, compared to 13-inch ultrabooks. The Ultra M3 is 4.4 pounds, but it is .79 inches thick. Of all of these, the biggest novelty of this Timeline is that it's the first ultrabook (as defined by Intel) to feature Nvidia graphics. It won't be the last.… Read more

Ultrabooks are a hot topic right now, but with so many superslim 13-inch laptops available, how do you choose the best one? It's especially hard in the new pseudo-category, as most of the ultrabooks we've seen are very similar, both in design and specs. For this eagerly awaited Prizefight, we pitted two of our favorite ultrabooks against each other: the HP Folio 13 and the Dell XPS 13.

The Dell has a very MacBook-Air-like design, whereas the HP is a bit more businesslike, but has fantastic battery life. Below, you'll see our laptop experts, me along with Julie Rivera and Brian Tong, rate both systems across several key categories, and at the end, we'll tally up the score and declare a winner. … Read more

A new generation of slim, lightweight laptops has taken the PC world by storm. These ultrabooks (to use Intel's trademarked marketing term) are exactly what many laptop shoppers have been longing for, a PC version of Apple's MacBook Air that runs Windows.

But despite very strong showings from HP, Dell, Lenovo, and others, there still is not an ultrabook on the market right now that really beats the MacBook Air in a head-to-head shootout. That's not because of price, processing power, or features -- the Air is more expensive, has about the same CPU horsepower, and lacks … Read more

There's no doubt about it: Samsung's Series 9 has always been a hot-looking laptop. Thin and every bit as iconic as a MacBook Air, the 2011 Series 9 laid the groundwork for all the sleek and sexy ultrabooks we've seen so far and throughout January's CES.

We've peeked at the second-gen Series 9 13-incher a few months ago, but we also knew that a larger-screened version was on its way. I saw it at CES, and wondered how the concept of a thin ultrabook would work on a 15-inch scale. Well, it's here now at CNET, and before I dropped it off at the Labs for testing, I spent a little time with it up close.… Read more