Up to 6 of these will be coming out in October

Asus reports that it will be launching five to six Ultrabooks in October in New York, when it will display its full range of Ultrabooks that will be priced from $899 – $1,999. The Ultrabooks will have screen sizes of 11.6″ to 13.3″ and will be ultra-thin and ultra-portable. Publicly-known models are the 11.6″ UX21 which was displayed at Computex 2011 and the UX31, which will be the 13.3″ model. It’s unfortunate that I find the Asus logo so ugly.

While Intel has envisioned that an Ultrabook should be powerful and ultraportable, they have also demanded that the Ultrabook be under a thousand dollars, which was rather impossible up until now. The first few prototypes by Acer and Asus both had mid-$1,000 price tags. However, Intel has been willing to help manufacturers to design Ultrabooks that are below $1,000, and also have invested money via they investment corporation to find innovative technology and cost-efficient methods of productions.

However, the Ultrabook has its critics. To me, an ultrabook is a very expensive laptop, and unless it were as slick and ‘cool’ as the MacBook Air, I don’t really see too much point to buying one, especially if I had to pay a premium and not get a significant performance bump. On the other hand, manufacturers have also been wary of the Ultrabook. While HP was supposed to unveil an Ultrabook, it decided to pull out of the PC market completely. The only people left in the market is Asus and Acer, and their move will be closely watched by their competitors

Source: Digitimes

The HP PC had a short, less-than-two-decade life. RIP HP PC.

This is as apt as it gets. After my HP Mini 110 got destroyed by me and my clumsiness, HP decides to slash prices on its webOS based tablets, selling them at $99. Surely, people who paid the original $400-plus price must be furious. The HP tablet is one of the shortest-living products in the history of computing, lasting only 49-days.

Nonetheless, today HP drops another bombshell – it will be getting rid of its personal computing business in a bid to go back to what its original founders did – invent things that aren’t mainstream.

HP’s Personal Systems Group (PSG) has announced that it will either be selling its PC business to someone else, or it will create a separate company that will handle the portfolio of the PSG.

“We believe exploring alternatives for PSG could enhance its performance, allow it to more effectively compete and provide greater value for HP shareholders,” said Léo Apotheker, HP’s president and CEO. “PSG is a world-class scale business with a leading market share position and a highly effective supply chain and broad reach and go-to-market capabilities. We believe there are alternatives that could afford PSG more autonomy and flexibility to make strategic investment decisions to better position the business for its customers, partners and employees.”

By now, HP would be finding other ways in which it can divest itself of its PSG. The whole process is expected to be completed in 12-18 months.  Even though it is the second largest PC manufacturer after Apple, HP is faced with larger issues regarding sales quantity growth, contrary to what its market share might suggest. According to Bloomberg, the PC unit accoutned for 30% of HP’s sales last quarter, but only generated 5.9% operating margin, which is the lowest among all of HP’s divisions. The future of its PC business is also foggy, as American and European markets for PCs have declined in the last quarter, while Asian (excluding Japan) markets have grown by more than 12%, but HP stood to gain less from this growth than its Asian competitors such as Lenovo and Asustek Computer Inc which gained a 23% and 6% growth respectively, against a 3% gain for HP.

Ever since its founding in 1939, HP has never been too keen on being a company which sells mainstream products. However, the turning point was in the mid-90s when Carly Fiorina, then HP’s CEO, decide to close a $18.9 million deal to acquire Compaq, against the resistance of Walter Hewlett and reluctance of David Packard.

There is no further news on what will happen to the existing stock of HP’s current range, nor how long will HP support these products. However, what you can be assured is that HP will now focus on other areas of its business, such as enterprise solutions, cloud services and other more esoteric computing-related businesses, much like what IBM is doing now.

Sources:  Bloomberg, HP

Americans: prepare for more debt!

Unlike the unfortunate case of the Ultrabook, Asus can successfully say that the price of the ultraslim and ultracheap Asus X101 netbook will not deviate much from the US$199 they projected. How did they do this? Well, simple, use the cheapest hardware, of course. According to the official Asus X101 website, it will come with this spec,

The X101 is ready for preorder in various websites, however, as it is right now only PCSuperStore can promise a $199 price. The price ranges from $199 to $209, as of now. For Europeans and Asians, unfortunately, Asus is totally skipping Europe and there is no word on the X101 hitting Asia.

The ultracheap, ultraportable and ultraslim netbook will break barriers in these three areas, but it does come with significant compromises. The 8GB SSD, for example, would really make this a poor purchase if you intend to install Windows 7 on it, as it will likely gobble up quite a significant bit of your memory especially if you climb above Windows 7 Starter. Then again, after installing a Windows OS, you won’t be able to do much else unless you put a high capacity SD card in. And then there’s the power – it comes with the lowest powered Atom processor, the N435, which runs at 1.33Ghz. That would pose even more performance-related problems if you intend to play games on it or watch HD videos on it.

However, this is just conjecture, though I suspect it won’t be too far from the truth. Without a sizeable hard disk, it’s hard to think of this as a practical piece of kit. You might, however, be more interested in the souped up version based on the same chasis – the X101h, which will sport a 250gb hard drive and Windows preloaded. Time will tell how useful the X101 if used outside its MeeGo confines.