There are tons of laptops out there today, laptops are being thrown into the shadows because of the tablets and the smartphones rise. Less and less laptops are being sold, check up the statistics.
But in these dark ages, there is a shining light on the world, something that gave me hope for the future and that things will all not be tabletish devices.
The Ultrabooks.
A short summary of what ultrabooks are:
Ultrabooks are Intel Laptops that are among the more powerful variants of the laptop market, some would say it's the Intel equivalent of Macbook Air, being thin and all that.
But the ultrabook is so much more than that.
First of all it is among the more powerful laptops there is, as mentioned earlier. It has to have at least an Intel processor so it can be called an Ultrabook. Other requirements are a minimum battery life.
I feel that the requirements of Ultrabooks are pretty fuzzy at times, but if you take a quick glance on Wikipedia, the requirements changes at all time.
What's set in stone from Intel is that they are supposed to remove the bulk without compromising performance and battery life.
That's a good thing, still having a lot of juice in your device and good battery life while still making it light to carry around with. Something pretty nice.
Requirements change from time to time, but there are some requirements seen in this picture below:
As you can see, the primary thing that decides if it will be an ultrabook or not is the processor, as Intel trademarked the name Ultrabook. If it doesn't have an Intel processor, it cannot be an ultrabook, simply as taht.
The rest of it is pretty standard, however there is one major thing that Intel hasn't specified there that I kinda dislike them for.
The resolution. I've seen some laptops today that still use 1366x768. That is an awful resolution in my opinion and especially Intel, who tries to push technology, should make at least 1080p a requirement for it to be called an Ultrabook. Personally I would love to see that Intel should make at LEAST 1600x900 a requirement for the lower tier ultrabooks, while the mid- to upper tier ultrabooks must have 1080p as a requirement. It feels pretty stupid having all that graphical power, all that juice inside your computer and then have to work on some stupid low resolution when you've bought an expensive machine. If it had been a normal laptop I wouldn't have complained, but when they market it as a powerful machine, why not have 1080p?
Why doesn't Intel make that an requirement? I have no idea.
But apart from that, I finally bought my very first ultrabook. In fact it is not even an ultrabook, it's an ASUS version that is called a Zenbook. At the time when ASUS made this ultrabook, touchscreens were a requirement on ultrabooks, making ASUS unable to call it an ultrabook.
Solution? Call it something similar like "Zenbook".
It is not a less good device because of that, it's in fact an amazing device but I do have some complaints about the device that I just bought, although they are extremely minor and shouldn't scare away customers from buying this zenbook at all. Just some nerdy needs that I have that I fixed.
Let us first look at this zenbook, make it into a little micro unboxing.
It comes in a very cool box itself, it really feels professional compared to other kinds of laptops I've unboxed before, together with friends and what not.
Some effort went into making the box look cool.
The zenbook itself is not very large, it's only a 13" compared to the 15.6" I have on the left. If you're wondering what the bottle to the right is, it's a bottle with stuff you have for cleaning screens. Like, freshen up my laptop before we take pictures.
Some further size comparison to it. I opted for going with a much smaller ultrabook as the size of the screen is not too important to me. I wanted a slick and small ultrabook that was light and had the requirements I was looking for.
This is where stuff starts to look pretty badass, the ultrabooks are so much smaller than a normal laptop and this picture was taken to show that. I could just simply throw out a random number here and just say it's 50% smaller or even greater than the laptop I'm comparing with.
It's also around 60% lighter than the laptop, when comparing what their weight. It's pretty good as I walk home from university all day, a walk that takes around 25-30 minutes and making it less heavy on my shoulders is just great.
Pretty horrible picture, but it does show how thin it is compared to a standard laptop.
vs.
The keyboard is fantastic and I prefer it a lot to my older laptops keyboard. There's less risk of the buttons falling off, or something falling under the keys and stops them from working properly. It's designed to be a better keyboard, but it is not only designed for ultrabooks. I know that there are laptops with these kinds of keyboards, but I like it a lot. The backlight works excellent and in the dark you can really see the keys.
vs.
Something this zenbook initially didn't impress me with was the touchpad. It felt weird using it, felt unresponsive and what not. Compared to my older laptop it felt meh but still usable. I discovered that it was because of some settings within Windows that made it feel unresponsive, but it was quickly changed once I got into the settings, same thing applied to Ubuntu when I installed it.
This however is the main gripe with the ultrabook. These kinds of chargers. I can honestly say I hate them. Why do companies make the end so big? What is the point to be honest? To sell more extension sockets?
I really hate these kinds of chargers, It's even more thick than the ultrabook so why this is designed like this really confuses me.
This is the worst thing with the ultrabook by far.
Overall it is a fantastic ultrabook, even though I haven't used it for a long time, I've owned it for around..what...5 days? But I tend to use the ultrabook more often in front of the tv rather than using my Nexus 7 instead, as I prefer the more clear picture. On that point, the display is matte, so it works AWESOME outdoors. I really wanted to try it out so I took it out on one of our sunny days and it working a lot better than my old laptop did outdoors.
Something I still can't grasp my head around is how to get into BIOS. When I first booted it up, Windows 8 was installed per default and I wanted to install Ubuntu on it instead of using Windows.
But there was no way for me to get into BIOS, as it seemed that ASUS had disabled the hotkey for getting into BIOS. Instead I had to go through Windows 8 and make it reboot into BIOS from there, where I managed to boot from my USB where I installed Ubuntu from. So I managed to get it working at least, but I still don't get up BIOS whenever I boot up.
I am slightly concerned that I will not be able to get BIOS up whenever I need it to, so I hope it'll never come to that.
There's possibly some means of going into BIOS through Ubuntu as well. But it is something I'm kinda annoyed at, as in the future I might change this drive into a SSD and I need to reinstall Ubuntu on it, how will I be able to do it when it doesn't go into BIOS first?
Hopefully it will automatically go to the next option, which is boot from USB and CD, but I have no idea yet. Maybe I need to call ASUS for it.
I do hope that Intel manages to push the Ultrabook concept out on the market. I don't think I need to make it a secret that I really like Intel and the ultrabook concept.
Let us just hope the future have something good in the future!
Source: http://www.zeldauniverse.net/forums/technology/154623-fohlins-technology-blog.html
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