Gadgetory

hey guys this is Joanna for the verge and i am here inside the verge CES 2012 trailer but outside here in vegas it has literally been raining ultrabooks ok not literally though i did get hit in the head with one yesterday but there are a ton of ultrabooks or thin and light laptops being announced at the show every computer manufacturer is jumping into the pool intel's talking about the future so i wanted to give you guys a look at some of my favorite ultrabooks here at the show and then give you a look at what's to come so let's start here with the samsung this is the samsung series 9 and it's kind of apropos to start with it because last year at CES samsung announced the series 9 and this is a refresh to it but it sort of kicked off the entire category so what they've done here with the new one is they've coded it in aluminum it's sort of a unibody or certain they they're saying a shell of aluminum feels really nice in hand really sturdy it's also one of the thinnest to be announced not even at the show but just to be on market so it's going toe-to-toe with the macbook air in terms of thickness feels really nice obviously and underneath you sort of get more premium specs than any of the other ultrabooks so this display is a 13 inch display with a beautiful norton pop up but it's really bright it's a 400 nits display with a 1600 x 900 resolution it's also a matte display so I sort of love this display if you cannot tell and its overall underneath the lid you get here a nice keyboard a nice touch pad a nice experience I think it's going to take some time to see how the touchpad works but the thing is with the Samsung is that this is more expensive than any of the other ultrabooks that are launching this is a 1399 then they're going to be other skus that go up to 15 99 so you get more premium specs here and you also get more of a premium build but you've got to decide if you want to pay more moving on to the HP's envy spectre 14 and this is again another sort of high-end ultrabook it's going to go for 1399 as well but what HP's done here is pretty crazy they're basically using glass all over the system this is a gorilla glass lid and then when you open it up you've got a glass touchpad and palm rest and a gorilla glass display so it picks up a ton of fingerprints this lid is sort of a fingerprint magnet if you're a murderer you do not want to leave your fingerprints on there also a really nice display here from HP this is a 1600 x 900 resolution display again really high resolution in comparison to the other ultrabooks but it's also got a radiance display which is sort of like an IPS equivalent for laptops just great viewing angles really bright so overall really nice in terms of builds HP's also put on its Beats Audio so you get this jog dial here on the Left nice keyboard the touch pads a little bit stiff so we'll see how that works out but again 1399 for a bit more of a premium system it's also a little bit thicker because of the glass so wanted to then talk about the dell this is the new dell XPS 13 and dell is actually coming in at the lower end of the market they are not pulling in a demo here and blasting out the specs with a really thin design but this is pretty thin it is pretty light and it's going to start at nine hundred and ninety nine dollars and you know overall it just feels like a nice system it just feels kind of solid all around a nice keyboard a backlit keyboard a nice big click pad we'll see how that works though it's been working really well when I was testing it before and you get a 13 inch display but it's got a lower resolution than the others in terms of specs on all of these they're pretty much the same you get a core i5 processor basically standard on all of them 4 gigabytes of RAM and 128 gigabyte solid-state drive and all of the ultra books are required to have solid state drives or they're required to boot really fast and resume from sleep really fast to make that experience really nice so that's basically the ultrabooks of today we wanted to give you a look at what's coming out later this year so this is the Lenovo yoga and it looks basically like a regular laptop you've got a keyboard you've got a touchpad you've got a nice palm rest here that's made out of leather ports on the side but it's running windows 8 and you can also flip it around and turn it in to a tablet so this morphs into a Windows 8 tablet works really nicely actually for windows 8 being such an early build at this point so turn it into a tablet I can also so flip it around here and turn it into a tenth of sorts can stand it up on a desk and something like that so really interesting form factor from Lenovo obviously this isn't coming out until the windows 8 time frame which is probably not till the fall but again this is the sort of thing we're expecting to see more of because Windows 8 is touch friendly I'm going to see a lot of these convertibles later in the year so that overall is a good look at what i think the Ultrabook story here is at CES 2012 welcome to the year of the Ultrabook