CES 2012: Intel demos Windows 8 touchscreen ultrabooks

Intel used its keynote presentation at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to demonstrate the merits of ultrabooks from Acer, Toshiba, Asus and LG.

Shmuel "Mooly" Eden, vice president and general manager of the PC client group at Intel said that users wanted the device to be "nice".

“They want the notebook to be small, sleek, sexy," he said.

Intel's design goal is to make the laptop both powerful and thin, making it light. At affordable prices, most companies would want to equip their workforce with such devices as it makes remote working easier and also helps by not causing back pain when being transported in a rucksack, according to Intel.

Eden said, "Intel is working to make every component slimmer to make ultrabooks thin".

Intel Capital is to invest $330m in ultrabook production from Intel's hardware partners.

The ultrabooks that Eden demonstrated on stage had built-in near-field communications (NFC) readers to secure transactions and the exchange of information. He placed a credit card with an NFC chip on the trackpad of an NFC-equipped ultrabook, to demonstrate how the device could be used to scans for financial transactions.

The ultrabook also has a touch-screen (front and back) and runs on Windows 8. It looks like any other laptop when open but has a transparent touchscreen on the back. When closed, users can interact via touch. The default user-interface is the tile-based Windows 8 interface.

Targeting Apple's Macbook Air, Eden said  the ultrabooks, would be priced "competitively", given the high prices of the Macbook Air and the slim Sony Vaio Z-series laptops.