1. September 8, 2011
batteryfast.co.uk
Ultrabooks harness the best of tablets to
fight Apple Macbook Air by batteryfast.
co.uk
Ultrabooks harness the best of tablets to
fight Apple Macbook Air by batteryfast.
co.uk
The Asus UX31 Ultrabook, due out in the final quar-
ter of this year.
To get the Ultrabook branding manufacturers have
to produce laptops that weigh less than 1.8kg, are
less than 20mm thick, have at least 5 hours battery
Looks a lot like a Macbook Air … Acer Aspire S3 life under intensive usage and are ultra-responsive
Ultrabook. in terms of the speed of the processor and the ability
of the laptops to boot up in under 7 seconds. Ultra-
PC makers have a new weapon in their battle to stop books also tend to have a metal chassis and include
tablets stealing laptop market share and prove Apple faster solid-state storage as opposed to traditional
doesn’t have a monopoly on design: Ultrabooks. hard drives.
Acer, Asus, Samsung, Lenovo, Toshiba and others Catching up to Apple
have all unveiled plans for new ultraportable Win-
dows 7 laptops that are thinner, lighter, faster and If this sounds like the Apple Macbook Air, that’s
have longer battery life than previous efforts. Acer because Apple is once again setting the benchmark
is the first cab off the rank with new models due for design. Intel Australia marketing director Kate
out next month starting at $1200. Burleigh conceded that the “Macbook Air was de-
finitely out there first” but she was confident that
Ultrabooks is the umbrella term for the new cate- the other vendors could come up with similar thin
joliprint
gory, which was created by chipmaker Intel to guide and light laptops with innovative designs.
vendors with a series of stringent rules.
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2. September 8, 2011
batteryfast.co.uk
Ultrabooks harness the best of tablets to fight Apple Macbook Air by batteryfast.
co.uk
them more palatable for power users than, for ins-
tance, netbooks.
Ultrabooks also have higher standards when it
comes to battery life, with most netbooks struggling
to get more than 3-4 hours out of a single charge.
More than ‘a piece of plastic that does
computing’
Ben McIntosh, general manager for computers at
Harvey Norman, said he was talking to all major PC
makers about stocking their Ultrabooks. Acer would
Brushed metal design … the Asus Ultrabook. be first, followed soon after by Asus and then HP,
Toshiba and others.
Intel’s actions, however, appears to suggest that it
is not completely confident in the ability of the PC “Ultrabooks I’m very excited about because it offers
industry to match Apple on innovation. The chipma- consumers the ability to buy something that’s no lon-
ker has created a $300 million “Ultrabook Fund” ger about tech and spec, it’s about lifestyle, battery
to help drive innovation in the category. life, usability and a nice design, rather than just a
piece of plastic that does computing work,” he said.
Intel wants 40 per cent of PC laptops to be Ultrabooks
by end of next year. “Previously for an Intel-based or Windows-based
laptop as soon as we started getting thin and light,
Laptops becoming like tablets performance went out the window.”
“Overall, it is combining the attributes of a tablet Acer announced its first Ultrabook yesterday, the
with the performance of a PC,” said Gartner analyst Aspire S3, which will go on sale from the first week of
Tracy Tsai of the Ultrabooks. October starting at $1199. Like the other Ultrabooks,
it looks remarkably similar to the Macbook Air.
She added that the the things people like about
tablets and smartphones – responsiveness, long
standby times and quick information access – were
now expected to feature in laptops too. The 13.3-inch As-
pire S3 is 13mm
“Given users’ apparent unwillingness to wait for thin, weighs 1.35kg,
long system boot-up time in their search for simple delivers up to seven
information snacks, these features will encourage hours battery life
joliprint
users to get back on their PCs again,” she said. and is built out of
aluminium/magne-
Tsai said that Ultrabooks also had higher powered sium alloy. There
processors – mostly the Intel Core i3, i5 and i7 range are several “instant
Printed with
– than traditional ultra-portable computers, making on” sleep modes that
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3. September 8, 2011
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Ultrabooks harness the best of tablets to fight Apple Macbook Air by batteryfast.
co.uk
Acer promises will allow users to get back to work as thin as possible and then you’re wrapping skin
in between 1.5 and six seconds, depending on the around it to keep it all together, there’s certainly
mode. going to be some commonality,” said Gore.
Nigel Gore, director of product management at Acer “Sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference
Australia, said in a phone interview that Acer’s aim between a BMW or an Audi or a Toyota Corolla be-
was to create a laptop that had the battery life and cause their styling and symmetry all have the same
lightweight design of a tablet but maintained a solid fundamentals.”
built-in keyboard.
Asus Australia confirmed that it would launch its
The Acer Aspire S3 in profile view. UX31 and UX20 Ultrabooks in the last quarter of
this year. Prices have yet to be announced.
Key tablet downside: no keyboard
The Asus models have 13- and 11-inch screens,
“As soon as it comes to creating a document, or any- respectively, with a starting weight of under 1.1
thing that requires content creation, the tablet is not kilograms and a thickness between 0.3 and 1.7cm.
the ultimate form factor for this and that’s where They have an aluminium alloy chassis but to keep
the keyboard comes into it,” he said. the weight and size down Asus, like some other
ultraportable laptop makers, has left out both an
“[Consumers] will tire of it because it’s not conve- Ethernet LAN port and an optical disc drive.
nient to type on their LCD directly on a tablet and
to carry an external keyboard is just adding to your Toshiba said its Ultrabook, the Portege Z830, would
burden.” launch in Australia by the end of the year. The com-
pany claims it will be 15.9mm thick and weigh just
Gore said the main impact of tablets on the PC mar- 1.12kg.
ket was being felt in the lower end of the market
but even then the impact was so far quite small. Sony and Dell declined to comment on their plans for
Ultrabooks in Australia. Lenovo recently announced
Acer ‘s global chairman JT Wang recently predicted an Ultrabook model, the U300, but has yet to say
the end of tablet fever, arguing the hype around when it will arrive in Australia.
tablets was already starting to cool down and consu-
mers were being attracted by laptops again. But Gore Intel’s Burleigh said Ultrabook was more than just a
said he said he believed the “very large market for marketing term, comparing it to the “Centrino” and
tablets” would continue “for some time”. “netbook” categories previously pushed by Intel.
Both were accompanied by a strict set of specifi-
Asked whether the Ultrabooks were simply a case cation requirements both under the hood and in
of the rest of the PC industry copying Apple’s design, terms of design.
he said all laptops had the same fundamentals but
joliprint
acknowledged Apple’s success in using new mate-
rials like magnesium alloy.
See also:
“Obviously when you take a keyboard and a piece of
Printed with
glass and you’re putting those together to try to be
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4. September 8, 2011
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Ultrabooks harness the best of tablets to fight Apple Macbook Air by batteryfast.
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CloudTag: Ultrabooks , tablets , Macbook Air , Dell
wr050 battery , Acer aspire 3680 battery , Toshiba
pa3533u-1brs battery , Dell gw240 Battery
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