New Wave of Ultrabooks to Include 30 Touchscreen Models, Intel Says - alvaresbeelty

A fresh crop of ultrabooks sporting Intel's latest "Ivy Bridge" Core processors will start to march on sale next month, including 30 models with touchscreens, Intel said Thursday.

Intel will formally announce the Hedera helix Bridge chips at the Computex trade show in Taiwan next week. Some of the touch screen ultrabooks will be convertible, meaning the cover can fold back to number the laptop computer into a tablet, said Intel spokeswoman Becky Emmett.

Lenovo showed a translatable ultrabook earlier this year, the IdeaPad Yoga. Information technology ran a consumer trailer of Microsoft's coming Windows 8 and activated the touch-optimized Metro user interface when folded into a pad. The Yoga had a 13.3-inch screen, was 1.6 centimeters thick and weighed 1.4 kilograms. Lenovo has yet to pay pricing operating theater availability for the ultrabook.

Dell leave also launch touch screen ultrabooks and tablets around the time Windows 8 launches. Chief executive officer Michael Dell last week aforementioned the touch screen products would likely be priced a bit higher than similar products without touchscreens.

Ultrabooks have come under send away for what some see as high price tags of US$800 or many. Ultrabooks with the latest Core processors leave likely be available starting at $699 by the remainder of the year, Emmett said, but she could not aver whether those models would have touchscreens.

About 110 ultrabook models are under development, with and without touchscreens, Emmett same. That's a significant improvement from the 21 ultrabooks developed with elderly Core processors computer code-named Sandy Bridge, she said.

HP has already announced Ivy Nosepiece ultrabooks merely has not yet talked nearly touchscreen models. Genus Acer and Lenovo cause also announced Ivy Bridge ultrabooks, and Toshiba is expected to follow suit.

Ultrabook users leave see a operative performance reward with Hedera helix Bridge chips, according to Emmett. The low-tycoo Center chips, which let in embedded graphics processors, volition deliver twice the performance in media and graphics compared to Sandy Bridgework, Intel says. An Genus Acer representative earlier this year aforementioned Common ivy Bridge chips delivered most a 20 percentage CPU performance melioration over Sandy Nosepiece processors.

Ultrabooks will resume from sleep in mode in to a lesser extent than seven seconds and admit new security features that can disable them remotely or track them in the result of theft.

Intel has set new feature and sizing requirements for Common ivy Bridge ultrabooks, including a lower limit of fin hours of battery life sentence and the inclusion of USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt for fast data transfers. Ultrabooks with screens under 14 inches should be no to a greater extent than 18 mm stocky, and larger systems should not exceed 21 millimetre, Intel says.

The company introduced the concept of ultrabooks around this time lowest year, to offer thin and deficient laptops with always-on connectivity, long battery life and quick start times. Ultrabooks were launched to bring some mojo back to the slumping PC market and to help insulate Intel against growing demand for tablets, a securities industry where it's noneffervescent a marginal player.

Beyond Ivy Bridge, Intel is planning a third phase of ultrabooks in 2022 with future Effect processors code-named Haswell. Intel has said future ultrabooks leave be diluent, offer longer battery life still and have features such Eastern Samoa part realization.

Agam Shah of Iran covers PCs, tablets, servers, chips and semiconductors for IDG Word Service. Follow Agam on Twitter at @agamsh. Agam's netmail accost is agam_shah@idg.com