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Touch-Based Experience to Dominate Ultrabooks Later This Year with Windows 8

By Dr. Jimmy Tang - on 6 Jun 2012, 12:16am

Touch-Based Experience to Dominate Ultrabooks Later This Year with Windows 8

If you've tested the preview version of Windows 8 recently, you would have been pretty familiar with the new Metro UI by now. But navigating through the new Metro UI isn't just the same if you're using a mouse since it's designed specifically for touch interfaces (like mobile phones or tablets). For now, the Windows 8 experience is pretty much limited by current hardware. However, all that will change later this year when the next generation of touch-based Ultrabooks make its way into store shelves.

Speaking at the e21 Forum keynote earlier today at Computex 2012, Tom Kilroy, Intel Corporation Senior Vice President, believes that Ultrabook devices will evolve with the addition of touch-based experiences. Intel believes that touch capability is a key component and will increasingly grow to become a standard feature across a wide range of devices.

In order to ensure the ample supply of touchscreen parts to fuel the growth of touch-based Ultrabooks, Intel announced agreements with several leading touch vendors including Cando, HannsTouch, TPK and Wintek. The investment will help these vendors to jumpstart production of high quality panels with sizes of 13-inches and above. Intel is expecting demand for such devices to increase by 3-5 times, and this agreement will ensure that OEMs have a steady supply of parts to help accelerate the transition into touch-based experience.

Ultrabooks will lead the transformation of computing experience with touch capable screens.

Besides traditional clamshell type of Ultrabooks, OEMs demonstrated several innovative convertible Ultrabook designs that could double up as either a laptop for a 'lean forward' type of usage scenario, or a tablet for a 'lean back' consumption type of usage mode.

Intel invited ASUS chairman, Jonney Shih, and Acer Inc's corporate president, Jim Wong, to demonstrate some of the innovative Ultrabook designs the respective companies have to offer to consumers later this year.

The impressive slim Ultrabook designs with touchscreen capabilities will come equipped with Intel's latest 3rd generation Intel Core processors. Intel launched five 3rd generation Intel Core processors today specifically for Ultrabooks. They are :-

Processor # Cores/ # Threads Clock Speed Cache Turbo Boost Hyper-Threading
i7-3667U 2/4 2.00GHz 4MB 2.0 Yes
i7-3517U 2/4 1.90GHz 4MB 2.0 Yes
i5-3427U 2/4 1.80GHz 3MB 2.0 Yes
i5-3317U 2/4 1.70GHz 3MB 2.0 Yes
i3-3271U 2/4 1.80GHz 3MB - Yes

Leading this evolution of computing experience, Intel announced that it is working with developers to develop applications that will take advantage of various types of sensors that will eventually be equipped in an Ultrabook. Sensors such as GPS, accelerometer, ALS and proximity will one day become standard features in future Ultrabooks and will bring new level of experiences to users.

Finally, Wang Leehom, famous Taiwanese singer-songwriter, made a surprise entrance to the keynote today to demonstrate mandarin speech recognition on the Ultrabook.

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