Businesses looking to acquire new laptops will no doubt come across large numbers of slim and sleek laptops on the market. Despite their diminutive size and relative affordable price tags, the new Ultrabook™ category created by Intel® is no slouch when it comes to delivering on the business front.
Indeed, Ultrabook™ incorporates a range of technologies and characteristics that are crafted to ensure they deliver a highly usable experience in spite of its compact and lightweight form factor. I highlight a trio of them below.
Performance
The specifications for Ultrabook™ called for ultra low voltage versions of Intel® processors. Because they have lower power requirements than traditional mobile processors, Ultrabook™ can be slimmer than ever while offering excellent battery life. Under the hood, Intel® Smart Response and Rapid Start Technology makes clever use of solid-state drives (SSDs) to speed up normal hard disk drive responses times and boot-up speeds, delivering SSD-like responsiveness and usability, but at hard disk drive (HDD) prices.
An example of a great performing Ultrabook™ would be the Dell Latitude 6430u, a rugged 14-inch Ultrabook™ that comes with either a 3rd gen Intel® Core™ i3, i5 or i7 processor, and up to 8GB of DDR3 RAM. Despite its weight of just 3.7lbs (1.69kg), the Latitude 6430u, featuring 3rd gen Intel® Core™ processors, measures a mere 0.82-inch (20.9mm) thick. Designed for businesses in mind, it delivers up to 10 hours for a “full day” battery life. Other business-centric capabilities would be its HDMI and VGA ports for working with external monitors and projectors.
Form Factor
Performance aside, Ultrabook™ devices are also available in a wide variety of form factors to take advantage of touch screen support found in Windows 8. This is in part enabled by the lower power requirements of the new, more power efficient microprocessor. As battery packs get pared down, the result is greater versatility on the design front.
Current form factors include rotating and detachable screens, as well as dock-able Windows 8 tablets such as the Latitude 10, featuring Intel® Atom™ processor Z2760. I’ve previously reviewed Ultrabook™ devices such as the Dell XPS 12 featuring 3rd Generation Intel® Core™ processors with its rotating screen too, which I’ve found to be a classy and highly flexible Windows 8 Ultrabook™.
Security and Management
All laptop security was at one point in the past an easily bypassed system password. Thankfully, various hardware security capabilities have made their way into laptops and Ultrabook™ devices since then. Ultrabook™ today incorporates a number of security capabilities not found in older laptops. Intel® Anti-Theft (AT) Technology, for example, makes it possible to remotely disable a lost or stolen Ultrabook™. Should the device be found or returned, reactivation of the Ultrabook™ is possible without any harm to its data. In addition, Intel® Identity Protection Technology (IPT) built into current Ultrabook™ platforms offer an additional layer of protection against password theft.
To further illustrate the point, the Latitude 6430u Ultrabook™, featuring Intel® Core™ processors mentioned earlier also comes with optional Intel® vPro™ systems management technology. This allows administrators to manage and perform software updates remotely; the remote management capability extends down to monitoring of battery health and the ability to manage the BIOS out-of-band.
This is a paid post in conjunction with IDG, Dell and Intel®