Here at Computex 2011 Intel coined the term "Ultrabooks" for what it expects will take over 40 percent of the laptop market share in the next six to nine months. You've already seen a bunch of them, a list that includes the Apple MacBook Airs, Samsung Series 9, Lenovo ThinkPad X1, and recently, the Asus UX21. They are these razor-thin laptops that run on Intel Sandy Bridge processors. The other equation that will define future Ultrabooks and mainstream laptops are instant-on technologies that Intel is dubbing "Smart Connect" and "Rapid Start," both of which will ship in laptops by the holidays.
Smart Connect is essentially an intelligent form of updating, and what it does, according to Intel, is enable any running application to update itself, even when the laptop is asleep. For instance, Intel demoed a laptop that was put in standby mode while an email client, Twitter, and Facebook ran in the background. Smart Connect will periodically wake up the system and check if there are any updates or emails before putting it back to sleep. Once the laptop is woken, resume times are much quicker because everything would have been updated.
Rapid Start makes use of flash storage that's embedded in the laptop's motherboard, which makes sense since this is essentially what Apple did with its own instant-on technology in the MacBook Air. When the laptop is put into hibernation mode, the OS and its applications write themselves into the flash component. What's compelling about Rapid Start is that you can remove the battery and AC plug, which means there's absolutely nothing powering the laptop, yet it'll still resume instantly or take about five seconds to come out of hibernation.
The Asus UX21, which debuted a day prior, uses some variant of these instant-on technologies. It also falls into a new category of laptops that Intel is calling Ultrabooks (whether the name sticks is another story). What these Ultrabooks will have in common is their extremely thin profile, lack of an optical drive, and long battery life. Intel mentions that these Ultrabooks will also run a low voltage variant of its Sandy Bridge processors, but we've already seen exceptions to this rule in the ThinkPad X1 (this ultrabook runs on a standard volt processor).
Intel is projecting that these Ultrabooks will nab 40 percent of the mobile PC market in the next six months, not because they're sexy and easy on the eyes. Rather, these systems will run for less than $1,000, so you make Ultrabooks mainstream by selling them at mainstream prices.