Home Future Ultrabook laptops will have touchscreens, voice recognition, longer battery life and lower prices, an Intel executive said Monday, as he also took a swipe at tablets during a press conference at the Consumer Electronics Show.
More than 75 Ultrabooks are in the pipeline for 2012 and new hybrid designs with tablet features will be released later this year, said Mooly Eden, general manager of the PC client group at Intel.
Intel is putting its muscle behind Ultrabooks, which are being promoted as a category of thin and light laptops with tablet-like features. Intel hopes that the addition of new features in future Ultrabooks will reinvigorate the slumping PC market, which is being battered by tablet sales.
“People like to create in order to express themselves,” Eden said. They are not “consumption cows,” he added, taking a shot at tablets, which are often viewed as more for accessing content than for creating it.
The sticking point remains the current starting price of Ultrabooks, which is more than US$800, but Intel hopes to bring the price down to under $699 by the end of the year.
PC makers and Intel are working together to accomplish that, he said. “Our target is to pull it [down] collectively,” Eden said.
Future Ultrabooks will not only be thinner, but the touchscreens will push their functionality to a new level, Eden said.
“The touch skipped the Ultrabook, it was dedicated to phones, it was dedicated to tablets,” Eden said. “It won’t skip the Ultrabooks anymore.”
Users don’t want to give up keyboards, so touchscreens will provide complementary functionality for gestures, zooming, cropping and scrolling, Eden said. Intel also announced a partnership with Nuance to bring speech recognition to Ultrabooks later this year.
Ultrabooks will also come in hybrid designs with flip screens that can be flipped down so that the devices look more like tablets.