CES 2012: Intel Ultrabooks to get touchy-feely

Ultrabooks demonstrated at CES today showed off the host of new features that will be available by the end of this year, including touchscreens, speech recognition features, bigger screens, and Kinect-style motion-sensing cameras.

The next generation of thin and light laptops will also be cheaper, says Intel.

Intel made the announcement and touted the success of its Sandy Bridge processors - 150 million have sold so far - at its keynote address for CES in Las Vegas early this morning.

Intel’s PC Client group’s vice president, Mooly Eden, took a swipe at the ‘content consumption’ focus of tablets before unveiling the new features.

“Consumption is good for cows, we are humans,” Eden said.

“All of us like to express ourselves with video, with story, with many different things.”

However, Ultrabooks released in 2012 will adopt some of the characteristics of tablets, including touch interfaces for both Windows 7- and Windows 8-based laptops. The Windows 8 concept touchscreen machine Intel showed off also featured a gyroscope, so some games could be played by picking up the laptop and tilting it.

“Ultrabook as a touch [device] will be a real solution. People don't want to give up the physical keyboard, but they want both worlds,” Eden said.

In testing, Intel found that 75% of tasks were completed using the touchscreen, he said. The company was surprised by how much the test subjects liked touchscreens, but Intel yielded similar results when testing in Brazil and China.

Intel has also partnered with speech recognition company Nuance to bring the technology to ultrabooks later this year.

Nuance’s Peter Mahoney said the company’s voice recognition product, Dragon, would have “deep integration” for a “great, really powerful voice experience” with the Ultrabook.

Mahoney said Dragon would understand nine languages and learn to understand unusual accents over time.

Intel also demonstrated Kinect-styles gestures - the camera on some Ultrabooks will be able to detect hand motion. This means some applications will be controllable without the user needing to touch the laptop.

Intel’s Mooly Eden also said there were more than 75 ultrabook designs being launched in 2012 and about 50% of those would have larger, 14- 15-inch screens.

“28% of the people who are not willing to move to ultrabook will move if we give them the big screen,” Eden said.

Several concept ultrabooks were showed off at the event, but the most impressive was a laptop with a transparent touchpad, which was equal to the length of the device’s keyboard.

The touchpad is designed as a window, so that when the ultrabook is closed, part of the device’s screen can be viewed. Some of Windows 8’s live tiles are displayed through this window so users can see their appointments and other data without opening the clamshell.

The whole length of the touchpad can be used, and it can distinguish between palms and fingers, so resting your hands on the touchpad will not move the cursor on-screen.

The price point of ultrabooks are set to start lowering in early 2012. Intel’s third-generation  Ivy Bridge processors are expected to launch in US ultrabooks in the middle of this year.

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