CES: Intel claims 75 ultrabooks this year
Outlines road to third generation ultrabook, with gesture and touch interfaces, NFC and super-low power
Published: 9 January, 2012
READ MORE: Intel | Processor | Netbook
Intel is determined to make its ultrabook platform as much a keynote of the Consumer Electronics Show this year as tablets were in 2011. There is good sense behind this - new reports indicate that all segments of the notebook market declined in the last quarter except the MacBook Air, which the superslim ultrabook resembles; while Intel will have an easier job leading the ecosystem for a notebook-like form factor than the more mobile-driven tablets.
The chip giant told the CES audience that as many as 60 ultrabooks will be available this year, running on its newest processor family, Ivy Bridge. It believes there are already 15 ultrabooks on the market, and the third generation of the devices - promising lower costs and more cloud-based features - will appear a year from now, running on a further wave of low power Intel chips called Hawell.
Intel also confirmed details of its NFC-based identity protection platform, which lets a user swipe a credit card by tapping the ultrabook in order to authenticate and make purchases online without entering or storing card details.
The firm was also looking ahead to making the ultrabook a more radical reinvention of the mobile computing experience - one criticism of the first models has been that they are basically an higher performance extension of the netbook, and do not move user behavior forward in the way the touchscreen tablet does. Intel and its partners have discussed more cutting edge future evolutions, though, which will incorporate always-connected features of 'cloudbooks' and harness touch interfaces.
At CES, Intel showed off a concept ultrabook taking advantage of Windows 8's touch capabilities to support tablet-style navigation. Another concept demo, called Nikinshki, consisted of a narrow touchpad running alongside a keyboard and regular display, and still available when the device was closed, offering quick controls via the Metro W8 tile-oriented interface. There was even a more futuristic demonstration of an ultrabook controlled only with gestures, and Intel announced a deal with Nuance to make voice recognition operate natively on an ultrabook without the need for a headset.
Acer was first off the blocks to launch ultrabooks, even before the show started, and many will follow through the week, including Lenovo. However, the Chinese giant was more focused in its main conference on ARM-based devices, launching the IdeaTab S2 10 and K2 as well as a new smartphone, the S2. The first tablet, based on a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, has a detachable keyboard and when that is removed, weighs only 1.1 pounds. The K2 is a more powerful slate for games and multimedia, running on a quad-core Tegra 3 processor from Nvidia and boasting inbuilt LTE and 3G, and a 1200 x 800 pixel display. All the new products, including a smart TV supporting Android Ice Cream Sandwich, are initially available only in China.
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