The History of the Ultrabook.

          Overview

     Did you ever think that the day would come when a laptop weighed under 4lbs and would have enough power to run Photoshop? Did you think that this class of laptop could measure under an inch and in some cases 15 millimeters? Welcome to the age of the ultra book "made by Intel." But was it actually made by Intel? Or was it made by Apple? Keep on reading for more on this topic. 

     Early Concepts

     Since the term was not used until 2011 by Intel we are forced to look hard and low for netbook like systems. I did find 1 by Sony called the VAIO X505. It was 2.2 lbs and had a Centrino 1GHZ processor. For today that is not industry leading, but at the time it was revolutionary. 

This was brought to America in 2003 and got many awards and was highly rated. Still we do not see mass adoption of this brand of computing for a while until Asus essentially created the netbook category with their first Eee machine. I will not accept those as true ultrabooks because they were not powerful and were based on the Intel Atom structure which still today has not proven itself.

     Modern Era - The Fight against Apple

     Truthfully the story stops at the Sony VAIO until 2011 at a fate filled CES Consumer Electronics Show when Intel announced the "ultra book" class. Intel set aside $300 million dollars for OEM's who wanted to release ultrabook to market. You probably have seen the ads by Intel for various skinny laptops and with Windows 8 pending the market is a bit dead right now. But what was the real initiative for the sudden push by Intel? Couldn't OEM's do this by their own? No, truthfully the ultra book race was made as an attempt to fight against the Apple juggernaut that would truthfully take a joint effort to stop.  In an attempt to make an attempt at quality control Intel released a list of specifications for OEM's to follow to get the deemed "ultrabook" status. Acer was the first to make's it own ultrabook the S3 which really was a first generation device in many ways. Asus came next with the Zenbook UX31E which was actually a pretty good device for a first time try. HP came out with the Envy line which has been in my opinion the best of them all, but some lack in certain aspects. Lenovo has jumped in with the Ideapad U300s which so far have had the best keyboard to rule them all. Toshiba had the cheapest first gen ultrabook at $799, but of course it was not the best and lacked in many areas. Dell released one the XPS 13 which had a weird rounded look. Samsung was the last OEM with the Series 5 products which were good in their respect with nice specs. The entire initiave is powered by Intel core i3, i5, and i7 ULV (ultra low voltage) CPU's with most of them featuring Intel HD3000 or HD4000 integrated graphics.

Windows 8 Changes the Game

    

      So CES finished not too long ago with some cool concepts by Intel and a lot of product releases by OEM's. What was most interesting was what Intel had to say. First they made some new regulations like you have to have "all day battery life" and every ultrabook has to have a touch screen for Windows 8. All of this screams good to the consumer and boo ho for the big companies. Also they showed off this thing they called Project North (pictured above) which has 1) A detachable tablet powered by an ULV Haswell processor and 2) A bezel that comes out of nowhere when you are in tablet mode for better touch screen capabilities. A concept like this they said will cost... $799 - $899. Considering that ultrabooks that were smaller, had no touch screens, and no Haswell (Haswell has superior gaming performance without discrete graphics and superior battery life due to lower TDP) this means Apple will get a BIG run for their money. This is what Intel has been wanting as we have seen them moving more into the Wintel partnership and abandoning Apple. It will be noted that this particular product will never make it mainstream but something similar might from a different company. So what does this really mean for the consumer? Windows 8 will be "forced upon you" in the point that laptops will have Windows 8 on them and you will be forced to learn the OS. Personally I love the OS but then a lot of people like Windows 7. Heck, I know people still loving XP! So this means you will have shiny new fast thin ultrabooks that will leave the first and second generation ultrabooks in the dust. For Apple who really look like they are having their worst year ever. I mean their stock price dropped over $200 and iPhone5 sales have been low. It looks like the people may have spoken and possibly for the Penguin fans it could be the year of the Linux desktop!

The return of the digitizer (UPDATED)

UPDATE: I had to add a lot more devices to the list because this was written before a lot of the devices were put on display in trade shows.  

    When people think of a stylus most think of a resistive screen tablet or a really old smart phone. Most think that the capacitive stylus is a good equal to the active digitizer or the N-trig system. It is very hard to explain the accuracy of the digitizer system. There are two major ones that power different variations of tablets and "phablets." In the tablet section the first digitized tablet was the HTC Flyer with the Scribe pen. It was all around a great tablet, but not marketed very good. The scribe pen was based on a N-Trig system which is a lot better that the capacitive for sure, but is slower than the WACOM system. The next major device that was not a WACOM made tablet like the boogie board (these are tabs without real OSes) was the Samsung Series 7 slate which was the official Windows 8 DP tablet that was huge and featured a WACOM active digitizer and horrible battery life and a overall forgettable experience. Combined with a really bad rear 3.2 mp camera and a huge unwieldy 1366x768 it was nothing to write home about. Of course do you think that artists want to carry a 12.1 inch tablet (Samsung Series 7 or Asus Ep/Bp 121) with paltry screen resolution and bad rear cameras which force them to use a dSLR or comparable mega zoom which makes them carry a lot of stuff. Or do you think with new advancements in active digitizer design's since then will they go for a 10.6 inch or even a large but super thin 11.6 inch design that offers better rear camera's and Super IPS + displays with full HD displays that also cost less?  Some trade offs are power in some like the Asus tablet 810 others are size like the Asus transformer book. The best solution is another Windows 8 official tablet the Surface Pro. Even though it is coming out a full 3 months later than the Surface RT it will be powered by an Intel core i5 Ivy Bridge and will start with a 64GB SSD. It will be a pretty svelte device at only 13.6mm which is a tad bit thicker than the MBA, but consider having a 10 finger multi touch screen and an active digitizer layer that features some pretty nice stuff like an eraser, or when you are writing and you put your finger on the screen it will stop writing and move the page or zoom in and out with your finger. Now we know a lot of the answers about the Surface pro because it is available. With a starting price of $999 it is not very cheap but packing an intel core i5 ivy bridge throttled CPU, 4GB of RAM, and 5 hours of battery life it makes up for the price.


      Another potential in the high powered, large, WACOM packing tablet sector is the Asus Transformer book series. This one is very diverse in options with a 11.6, 13, and 14 inch variations all with 4GB RAM and a front 2MP Full HD webcam and a rear 5MP camera which is good for taking concept pictures, but with a 14 inch it might be a bit hard to steady it. These unlike the Surface Pro like the Android Transformer series have a detachable keyboard, but unknown to us if it adds extra battery life or not. What is very unique in an ultrabook is the 14 inch will come with an optical drive for making DVDs and Cd's or just watching a movie. The thin factor is hard to beat and intel core innards (some report all three ivy bridge 3,5,7 will be available) is very powerful for Photoshop, Autodesk, and other tasks. Also a Full HD screen is a big plus with a Super IPS + panel too it makes for some stiff competition. 

     Another Asus make is the middle of the road priced Asus tablet 810 from the Eee PC family. There are a couple of things that make it a budget tablet that still feels like a premium device. The first is the Intel Atom processor. Even though they have come very far in producing an overall better product it is still a budget processor. The tablet runs on a Clover field chip 1.86 GHz dual core CPU with 4 hyper threads. It does come with a Super IPS + panel to help with glare issues, but that budget price makes it a 1366x768 lack luster screen resolution. After that the budget seams stop and the beauty of a premium product shows. An 8.7 mm thin design is thinner than the Ipad 2 or 3 and it still manages to fit in a mini HDMI port, headphone, and docking ports in the tablet itself. Like it's more expensive brothers and sisters it has a removable docking station that boosts the battery life from 8 hours to 16+ hours. Also a separate charging port and 2 USB 3.0/2.0 ports abide in the rear of the dock. The WACOM digitizer and docking station come included which really makes this a steal if it is $599  but sadly they priced it at a whopping $799 without the dock.



      All in all the active digitizer market is not dead it is still alive among professional people like photographers and artists. I think the digitizer is a great addition to the Windows Journal since digitizers have palm rejection built in. The Android tablet space does have some N-trig friends from Samsung like the Galaxy Note "phablet" and the Galaxy Note 10.1 inch tablet that both feature the S-Pen.

Gaming Laptop or Ultrabook? You Decide!

         Deciding on getting a powerhouse gaming laptop versus getting a small portable Ultrabook may be a hard decision. If you are like me, and are a gamer/student this post is for you!

         Ideally, you want to have a small and portable laptop for home, school, and just for the reason that you can bring wherever you want to. But as a gamer, I understand that this is not generally simple if you want to be able to play intensive games like BF3, Crysis 2, or Skyrim.

       On the other hand, people who only play things like Star Craft 2, World of Warcraft, League of Legends, Left for Dead, or Star Wars the Old Republic can deal with using a smaller less powerful laptop.

This brings us to the comparison of an Ultrabook and a gaming laptop. (I chose two laptops from asus that each cost roughly the same amount of money, $1,500)

Asus G55VW-DS71 -

This laptop packs a 1920x1080p in a 15 inch LCD
12GB of DDR3 1600mhz (expandable up to 32GB)
750GB 7,200 RPM Hard Drive
Standard DVD-CD player
2GB Nvidia GTX 660m
Intel Quad Core i7-3610QM @ 2.3Ghz-3.3Ghz (in Turbo Mode), with 6mb L3 cache



Asus Zenbook Prime UX21A-

This Ultrabook also has a very nice 1920x1080p resolution in a 13 inch LCD
4GB DDR3 1600Mhz
256GB Solid State Drive
No CD-DVD player
Integrated Intel HD 4000 graphics
Intel Dual Core i7-3517U @ 1.9Ghz-3.0Ghz (in Turbo Mode), with 4mb L3 cache


HDD- The Zenbook Prime has a Solid State Drive which is far more faster than the g55's 7,200 rpm hard drive. The Zenbook is much lighter, smaller, extremely thin, and incredibly portable, while the G55 is much bigger, thicker, heavier, and bulky.  But a trade off for speed leaves a much larger hard drive capacity for the G55. The decision is whether you want to have speed when opening files, programs, or having it turn on fast or having a three times larger capacity.

CPU- The G55 contains an i7 quad core from Intel that can reach 3.3 Ghz, while the Zenbook has a Dual core Intel i7 that can reach 3.0Ghz. Its clear who wins in this category, but not to say that the Zenbook's CPU is slow. It is actually very powerful considering the Zenbook only uses up to 35 watts. Both of the CPU's are Ivy Bridge 3rd Gen i-processors.

CD-DVD- The G55 comes with a standard disk reader, but you can always change it out and swap for a Blue Ray drive at any time. The Zenbook requires an external disk reader. In this case you are sacrificing not having a disk reader for having a smaller size, and weight.

Resolution/Screen- Both the G55 and Zenbook Prime have a 1920x1080p LCD screen. This resolution is often known as Full HD, and is very sizable. The Zenbook has a 13 inch screen, while the G55 has a 15 inch screen. The two inches does not really make or break either laptop, its just a preference of small or big.

RAM- The clear winner is the G55 with its 12GB of RAM. The g55 is also expandable to having 32GB, while the Zenbook can only have 4GB. The Zenbook's RAM is also built into the motherboard, so you cannot add or take away any RAM.

Graphics- The G55 contains Nvidia's new Kepler series 660m. This card is much more powerful than the Zenbook's integrated HD 4000 graphics. Both of these GPU's run Direct X 11, as opposed to intels previously Direct X 10 Integrated graphics. To see an in depth look at both the graphics performance, please check these links
HD 4000 - http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-HD-Graphics-4000.69168.0.html
660m - http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-660M.71859.0.html

Size- From the pictures above, it is obvious on which one is smaller and more portable. The Zenbook is also 2.5lbs while the g55 weighs about 9lbs. 

 Gaming- The G55 crushes the Zenbook with it superior RAM, CPU, and GPU. The G55 can play any game out on the market to date. But this doesnt mean that the Zenbook can't play any games. The Zenbook is fully capable of playing games as well. The only things it cant play (cant play well* i should say, because it technically can play anything at a lower resolution) are brand new games that utilize the latest graphical technology. Older games such as World of Warcraft, Left for Dead, or Star Craft 2 are able to be played better than you may think on the Zenbook.

School- Because the Zenbook uses a much lower wattage than the G55, the Zenbook will have a much higher battery life. The Zenbook is also very small and can easily fit into any backpack, while the G55 will either not fit, or barely fit. Both also have back-lit keys for lectures using power points in the dark. Carrying a 9lb laptop combined with the weight of books or other things may be cumbersome for some people. The Zenbook is very light and small, so it wont be very cumbersome at all.

You Decide!- At the end of the day, it is all up to you if you want to have a gaming laptop or Ultrabook. As for me personally, i chose to get a G53 (the older brother of the G55). I chose it because it was a desktop replacement. Looking back at my decision i somewhat wish i bought an Ultrabook simply because my G53 is very heavy and big. I find it cumbersome at school because it just barely fits into my back pack, and carrying a backpack, a big binder, and a 17-inch case (because of its size) is tiring. But i love my laptop none the less. If you are willing to bear the weight and size of the G55, it is well worth it. But if you travel a lot, the Zenbook is definitely for you.