Windows 8 Ultrabooks

Product Roundup Stop anyone on the street and ask them for a definition of the term ‘Ultrabook’ and I suspect they will look at you with utter incomprehension. Hardly surprising, since Intel’s effort to create a popular brand for thin’n’light notebooks hasn’t really been a roaring success.

To me, the Ultrabook is the logical evolution of the laptop. I mean, who doesn’t want a notebook that’s lighter, thinner, more powerful and sexier than the one they bought three years ago?

The new Ford Fiesta is more economical, more spacious, more comfortable and better equipped than previous models, but that doesn’t make it an ultrahatchback. This is what happens when you let members of the marketing and PR departments out of their cages.

So let’s not get bogged down in exactly how thin an ultrabook should be with a given screen size, exactly how fast it boots up, how much it weighs - though curiously this isn’t something Intel seems to have laid down the law on - or exactly how long the battery lasts.

Rather let us for a moment just assume you want a thin and reasonably light laptop with a half-decent battery life, a USB 3.0 port or two and, this being the era of Windows 8, perhaps something in the way of a touchscreen. And that you have no use for a built-in optical disc drive.

And let us also assume you are not overly concerned about the bump in performance likely to come with Intel’s new Haswell architecture, which will start superseding today’s Ivy Bridge chips later in the year.

Unless you only have ￡350 to spare and just want something mundane made of plastic to permanently sit on your desk that’s surely what most potential notebook buyers want.