The brief word on the street was that ODMs/OEMs were having trouble making Ultrabooks (essentially laptops with a form like a MacBook Air) for under $1,000. Then a report popped up of Acer’s offering that should creep in at $768 to $960, helping to put to rest the fears of a ballooned budget.

According to Digitimes, Intel has put together a reference design and bill of materials that range from $475 to $710. Mind you, that’s the just the material cost, so the final product will definitely reflect further value-added cost on top.

The Taiwanese publication details that the 0.8-inch (21 mm) notebooks have a BOM of $475 to $650 and the 0.7-inch (18 mm) design has one $493 to $710.

It looks like a sub-$1000 Ultrabook will be real after all, though it still remains to be seen how much you will have to pay to get the configuration you desire.

Images of Acer’s answer to Apple’s MacBook Air – the Acer Aspire 3951 sporting Intel’s ultra-sleek ultrabook design – have found their way online. The shots were provided by Vietnamese site Sohoa, and reveal an extremely thin chassis that looks too brittle to be real. Still, that’s the point of Intel’s sexy ultrabook design: a hot, super-thin body packed with impressive hardware for under $1000 USD.

The Acer ultrabook is reportedly slated for October (seems to be a hot month for gadgets) and will sport a 13.3-inch screen, an aluminum chassis and an overall weight of less than 3.09 pounds. It will also supposedly measure just 0.51-inches thick – roughly the equivalent size of Apple’s impressive MacBook Air 13-inch model. The images provided by Sohoa confirm that most of the device’s ports are located on the rear just under the hinge.

Under the keyboard, the ultrabook will feature Intel’s second-generation Core CPU, 250 GB or 500 GB of HDD, optional 160 GB of SSD storage, a memory card reader, HDMI output, USB ports, Bluetooth 4.0, an HD webcam and more. The device will jump out of sleep mode in 1.7 seconds and even have a standby time of 30 days. Actual runtime should be around 6 hours.

So far rumors are pointing to a pricetag ranging from $768 to $960 USD, depending on the configuration. In the meantime, to see the full gallery, head here.

You may have noticed these new-fangled tablet things that appear to be quite popular in some circles. Mouse and keyboard makers Razer has been experimenting with the miniature charms of these ultraportables for some time now, first unveiling its concept gaming tablet, the Switchblade, back at CES in January.

The Switchblade is a clamshell design with a seven inch screen at the top and a tactile keyboard that adapts to whatever game you’re playing with icons replacing the key symbols. Inside, there’s WiFi and 3G connectivity, a discrete graphics card and an Intel Atom processor.

The company has put out a press release today claiming that the Switchblade is the first device to use Intel’s Atom Z690 CPU running at 1.7GHz. Razer reckons this is good enough for gaming, although to be honest I’m not convinced – an Atom is an Atom is an Atom and all that. Not that it matters hugely, the Switchblade is still only a concept device with no firms plans by Razer to bring it to market – although giving out details of the chip inside does make it more likely that it will eventually appear.

Also, it’s beautiful and rightly won lots of awards at CES. And this is as good an excuse as any to show off pictures of what a handheld PC gaming tablet might look like, if we were very lucky.

MSI’s prepared yet another new beast for your next LAN party, and there’s a serious bit of dedicated gaming punch lying under this notebook’s brushed metal finish thanks to its 2GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor, an NVIDIA GeForce GT 555M card and the audio tag team of MSI Premium Sound and THX’s True Studio Pro. In addition to its 15.6-inch 1366 x 768 HD display, this “dream machine” sports a 720p camera, an HDMI out port and USB 3.0. The company’s also thrown in a GPU Boost feature, which frees up the internal graphics chip should you be running any graphics-intensive apps. Unfortunately, your zerg Swarm-slaying hands will have to wait for an official price and retail date, but when you do get a hold of it, make sure to keep that caffeinated brew far from the keyboard.

ASUS has gone and made its super svelte Eee PC X101 official with a dedicated product page live on its site. We’d already gotten our hands-on with the crimson-colored ultraportable, but now there’s a whole list of specs to flesh out this 920g wonder.

The MeeGo-running netbook’s rocking a 10.1-inch 1024 x 600 display, 1.33 GHz Intel Atom N435 (or N455) processor, 8GB SSD, Bluetooth, WiFi, SDHC card support and USB 2.0. Oh, and did we mention this 17.6 millimeter thin beauty comes in three shades of awesome? That’s right, when this $199 netbook finally hits retailers’ shelves you can also snag it in white and brown.

SOURCE via Asus

At Computex 2011, Intel unveiled a new form factor of notebook it calls the Ultrabook. Essentially, it’s an extremely thin and light notebook that’s powered by Sandy Bridge-class processors – not unlike the new MacBook Airs from Apple.

While Acer and Asus have signed on to make Ultrabooks, they may not be able to hit that magical under-$1000 mark that Intel wants – despite having the platform already being subsidized by Intel.

Notebook Italia reports that Acer will launch its Ultrabook in Q4 2011, but it will arrive with a price of four digits. Another source told Slashgear that Asus UX31 and UX21 Ultrabooks will be over $1000 as well, unless a sacrifice is made to drop the CPU down to a Core i3. Models with Core i5 and i7, paired with SSDs, will range between $1000 to $2000.

It seems that the MacBook Air line isn’t carrying as much of an “Apple tax” this time around.

Various reports indicate that Acer is planning to release a “notebook” built with Nvidia’s dual-core Tegra 2 processor clocked at 1 GHz. The company also intends to release an ultrabook packed with an Intel processor and tablets sporting Google’s Android 3.2 “Honeycomb” OS.

The news arrives by way of company chairman and CEO J.T. Wang as he addressed concerns about the company dropping from the second world’s largest PC manufacturer to the fourth largest during the second quarter of 2011. He said that to regain its lost market share, the company plans to adopt a new strategy to create “more value instead of pursuing volume growth.”

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Always carry your laptop around for work usage, but also likes to watch some nice video contents on your home’s huge ass 3DTV from your laptop? Well, sometimes the HDMI cable is a big hinder. You’ll need to place your laptop near to your TV, and also mess things up. Won’t it be better if all you need to do is to link both together wirelessly? Well, such technology already exists, and it’s called the Wireless-Direct, aka WiDi, and Acer’s latest Aspire 5755 comes with it.

This one packs a 15.6-inch display with a rather lowly 1366 x 768 resolution, but it at least boasts some built-in WiDi so you can easily view movies (or anything else) on a larger display without the need for any pesky cables. Otherwise, you’ll get your choice of Intel Core processors (up to a Core i7-2820QM), up to 8GB of RAM and a maximum 1TB of storage, NVIDIA’s Optimus-enabled GeForce GT 540M graphics, and either a Blu-ray or basic DVD drive — all for a starting price of £899 (or roughly $1,440). This one’s available in the UK right now, but there’s no news on availability on other regions.

SOURCE via Tech Digest

If you think the picture above is photoshopped, then you’re very wrong. That insane laptop is real, and really comes with dual-monitor. After first appearing in September of 2009, GScreen went missing, until 2010 where it made a short appearance again. Now, however, it seems that the company is ready to show their dual-screen laptop to the world, for real.

The first run of SpaceBooks is now up for pre-order, with each one offering a pair of 17.3-inch displays that boast a 1920 x 1080 screen resolution. Each panel slides out horizontally (think wings, but on a laptop), and creates quite the spacious area for creative professionals to immerse themselves in.

The entry-level piece is being hawked for $2,395, which nets you a 2.66GHz Core i5-560M CPU, 4GB of DDR3 memory, NVIDIA’s GeForce GTS 250M (1GB), a 500GB HDD, DVD burner and a magnesium alloy frame. The pricier sibling is marked at $2,795, with that premium grabbing you a 1.73GHz Core i7-740QM, double the RAM and quadruple the bragging rights. Yes, those processors seemed to be NOT from the Sandy Bridge lineup. There’s no exact word on when these will ship out, but you’ll need to in-between time just to wrap your mind around the object you’re certainly still peering at above.

Source

AMD and Nvidia have been biting the hands and necks of each other. Now that Nvidia has thrown in a new flagship for their mobile GPU division for extreme gaming laptops with their new GTX580M, AMD is also going to join in the ring.

The outfit just unveiled the Radeon HD 6990M with DirectX11 and HD3D support, and it insists this is the speediest GPU on the block — specifically, up to 25 percent faster than any other GPU that’s been announced to the public. And yes, AMD’s well aware of that 580M. Just like NVIDIA came out swinging, making pointed comparisons to the Radeon HD 6970M, AMD’s got some fighting words of its own: the company says the 6990M can whip the 580M in the benchmark AvP and games such as Batman Arkham Asylum, Dragon Age 2, Shogun 2, BattleForge, Left 4 Dead, Metro2033, Wolfenstein MP, The Chronicles of Riddick, and ET: Quake Wars. We don’t need to remind you that these numbers merely represent the story each company wants to tell. Still, you get the idea: these are the top-of-the-line cards each has to offer at the moment, and they’ll likely be competing for space in your next gaming rig.

As you can imagine, the 6990M joins other Radeon HD cards in supporting the company’s Eyefinity technology, as well as GPU app acceleration. Let it be known, too, that while the 6990M supplants the popular 6970M as far as performance claims go, AMD tells us the 6970M will still be available for the foreseeable future. Speaking of availability, the 6990M will be offered in the Alienware M18x — right alongside NVIDIA’s 580M.

Additionally, you’ll find it packed inside Clevo’s P170HM and P150HM. And you didn’t think we forgot about specs, did you? Head on past the break to find the full PR, along with a handful of technical details straight from the horse’s mouth.