Tech Talk 2012: Ultrabook

The beginning of the year is undoubtedly the best time to be a technology soothsayer, predicting the year's upcoming technology hitmakers and forecasting the Silicon Valley's buzz word.

Cutting-edge design gizmos started cropping up as early as the first quarter and vehemently topping one over the other the next month or so. A quintessential search for the best technology that could work wonders for us consumers culminates at the beginning of the year.

A lot has been said about TABLETS replacing NETBOOKS from the past year, but there are more exciting tech toys that didn't even lift off into a large consumer base. Take PURSEBOOKS(e.g., Lenovo Pocket Yoga and Sony Vaio P series) for example, having such a laptop at the palm of your hand is really a work of art, but the meager battery capacity defeated its mobile purpose.

This year, everybody's rooting for the ULTRABOOK. With the advent of MacBook Air, the market for ultrathin laptops broadens. And everybody's churning out their own iteration of razor- thin laptops, Acer has Aspire S3, Asus has ZenBook, Lenovo has the ThinkPad X1, and Toshiba the Portege Z830. But the ultrathin technology has been in the midst since 2004, remember Sony Vaio X505? So what's the fuzz now. Better battery? Faster proc? Better GPU?

There are considerations one has to think though when availing any of these ultrabooks:

1) SSD - Solid State Drives are damn too pricey. And having a 256GB of disk space is tantamount to getting two pieces of 1TB SATA.

2) Battery Life - one letdown of a mobile technology is having a battery that doesn't even last for a day. Imagine making an urgent proposal at Starbucks for an hour, and while having a dinner at a restaurant, your boss called up to produce Sales Performance Review report. That's already two hours all in all. But if your device can barely last for two hours, then it's a technology self-collapse in the making.

What about you. How mobile and compact your device is and how long will it last for a day's regular use(office productivity, email checking and browsing).

And oh, talking about ultraportability, I just shrunk my MacBook Air and it's now the smallest in the world, hahahaha.