Nandagopal Rajan
This was pretty much the year of the
Ultrabook. They might not have sold much, but everyone was talking about Ultrabooks. Even the companies were silent about their non-slim, non-Intel devices.
Some of this was deserved, because the Ultrabooks shrunk the laptop like never before. Sure, we had size-zero laptops before, especially from Sony Vaio, but this was an entire race, not a one-off birth. The year started with the really slim Ultrabooks that stuck to Intel's standard as much as they could, except for maybe the $1000 price ceiling. The price ceiling was soon forgotten and some companies decided to make Ultrabooks with everything that were not supposed to have - HDDs, optic drives and even a fatter body.
Whatever their size, Ultrabooks made laptops thinner and lighter by at least 25 per cent. In our books the best Ultrabook was the
Samsung Series 9, which ironically did not want to be called one. The Toshiba Protege Z830 was an incredibly light and amazingly powerful machine which did not make any compromises with the features on board. The
Asus UX31 Zenbook was also a good specimen of craftsmanship and design. But then these were all extremely expensive models that found limited acceptance. So, when the Sony Vaio T series became available at under Rs 50,000, despite being slim and powerful as Ultrabooks are meant to be, it was both happy and sad. Happy that finally a good Ultrabook had become affordable and sad that it was a bit too late, considering Windows 8 was round the corner.
Among regular laptops, we loved the HP DM4 for it ushered in a new era of notebooks that had great sound quality among other features. So, this was undoubtedly the year in which the notebook found its voice, maybe with help from Beats Audio and Dolby. Other notebooks that need to be mentioned here are the Asus N56VM, the
Toshiba Satellite U840 and the
Dell Inspiron 14R, all because of different USPs. This was also a year in which you could buy a notebook without fearing if it would be good. You just had to get your budget right.
One of the sad stories of the year was the near death of the netbook. This has a lot to do with the fact that tablets were becoming cheaper and trying to do the same things as the netbook. There were couple of good models that came up this year like the HP Mini 210, but we fear this is the last we have heard about this segment.
This was also the year that we saw the new breed of convertibles and hybrids meant for the new Windows 8 operating system. But that is a story that can be continued next year.
Your favourite tech magazine Gadgets & Gizmos has gone digital! Grab your copy now!
Special 
