14 DAY TRIAL // The Acer Aspire 3951 leaks may have caught the eye of market watchers, but ASUS might make an even stronger impression at IFA if it really has as many ultrabooks as recent rumors suggest.
The Ultrabook product concept is one whose fate, at least for the short term, may or may not be decided during this year's IFA trade show.
There, Acer's Apire 3951 and other super-thin notebooks will make their appearance, ready to suffer the judgment of prospective buyers.
For those that do not remember, IFA 2011 will take place from September 2 to September 7.
One issue that Ultrabooks haven't exactly surmounted is that of pricing, since Intel refused to let CPU prices fall.
Regardless, even with this impediment, Ultrabooks are still expected top be very relevant and rapidly gain market share.
That said, the folks over at Digitimes managed to get another report out, one regarding the actions that ASUS wants to take in this area.
More specifically, instead of just one or two, ASUS has five or even six ultrabooks in the making, measuring between 11.6 inches and 13.3 inches in diagonal, respectively.
The prices will range between US$899 and US$1,999, or so the report says, which means that the $1,000 mark was still worked around somehow.
The factors that enabled the lower limit are the very cheap DRAM products and fairly affordable display panels, among other things.
Acer will be the main competitor, since Toshiba and Dell are going to play it safe for a while longer and HP already said it was existing the PC market altogether.
Finally, the report states that Intel is working with partners on driving prices down, even if cheaper CPUs are not among the options.
What remains is to see if this new breed of mobile PC can counter the market share stealing effect of tablets.