Futuristic branding and ambitious strategy were the keywords when Intel announced the launch of Ultrabooks at the Computex trade show on Tuesday. When market players are competing on every aspect of customer satisfaction, Ultrabooks promise to deliver best of the two worlds- Performance of a laptop combined with high portability of a tablet.

Interestingly, if you pit Ultrabooks against Netbooks, the latter promised nothing. Neither performance nor portability. Though netbooks are lighter and smaller they aren't lighter or smaller enough to let customers freely walk around or lay back on a beach without having to worry about the battery usage. Processor performance of netbooks wasn't even in their advertisements.

Netbooks couldn't withstand the onslaught of tablet computers when all the discussions featured around what netbooks can't do. Netbooks were marketed as a companion device for users' primary PC. When tablets, especially the Apple iPad, were shown the limelight it didn't take much time for consumers to decide that tablets could be better secondary option given its sleeker design and higher battery life. A smaller device that occupied lesser space and which didn't need to be plugged like his big PC. As the US and the world market started slowly catching up on electronics consumption after the recession, Netbooks sales started dwindling as more embraced a PC or a tablet.

Netbooks and even PCs running low on batteries have always been a concern for users who switched to tablets which promised lower power consumption for leisurely activities like browsing, reading or checking emails. By tackling a relatively subtle aspect of user experience, power consumption, Intel might probably pave way to a revolution in the way PCs are conceived. Ultrabooks thus have the potential to tap into the tablet business without sacrificing the PC users.

Even though skeptics are voicing their opinions that Ultrabooks might just be one last try to revive the Netbook market, industry analysts seem confident about its potential if Intel can actually provide, what it is promising now by the end of 2012.

Ipad Intel Intel Intel