14 DAY TRIAL // Coming to offer some sort of break from the flood of devices that IFA has unleashed, the rumor mill stumbled upon a certain tidbit of information that might shed some light on the probable fate of the Ultrabook.
The Ultrabook idea came about as a response to the rapidly growing tablet segment, which started to eat laptop market share quite quickly after it took off.
The 2011 edition of the IFA trade show saw the emergence of the Acer Aspire Ultrabook S3 and the Lenovo U300, among other things.
Meanwhile, ASUS was found to be working on six such mobile personal computers, set to be launched this year, as early as October.
It is now implied that ASUS is already looking ahead and, convinced of the chances of this laptop type, has set up a mid-term, if not even a long-term plan.
More specifically, as reports now state, ASUS has already decided on what its next Ultrabooks will be and when they will show themselves.
Next year's April is the targeted time frame, although the entry-level won't be among the segments serviced, at least at first.
Apparently, high component pricing is expected to make Ultrabooks just too expensive for budget customers initially anyway.
Entry-Level Ultrabooks, based on Intel's Ivy Bridge CPUs, might finally show up at some point during the 2012 second quarter.
Though the price range is cited at $600 to $900, the first batch isn't bound to go any lower than $899, and the upper limit will be quite higher than that.
Overall, this all is either the effect of conflicting leaks and rumors, or simply the result of new price expectations among suppliers and manufacturers.
For those that want to get an idea of the hardware, 22nm chips will be used, along with the 3D Tri-Gate design, for up to 37% performance boost.