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Avalanche of Ultrabooks: up to 50 will be announced at CES

Acer Aspire S3 UltrabookIf you have been dying for some more Ultrabooks to hit the market than we have some amazing news for you. There could be as many and 50 Ultrabooks launched at January’s CES. The Consumer Electronics Association expepts to see between 30 and 50 Ultrabooks to be debuted at the show.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini is scheduled to make a keynote speech in Las Vegas during the conference at which time he is expected to announce a new more powerful 22 nanometer Ivy Bridge processor. It is rumored that this processor will be the brain of all the newly launched Ultrabooks during the show.

Currently there are only a handful of Ultrabooks on the market, even though everyone seems to be excited about Ultrabooks sales are not meeting expectations. Sales numbers for early Ultrabooks are one third of what were expected, and might be a bad omen for the coming surge of skinny laptops.

Just because so many Ultrabooks will be launched does not mean that they will be a success. Last year over 100 new tablets were launched at CES, all trying to unseat Apple’s iPad, and for the most part those tablets have failed to make a sizeable dent in the iPad’s market share. In 2010 the big product was 3D TV, and those still haven’t become popular yet.

Ultrabooks promise to be thinner, lighter, and last longer than other laptops, but only time will tell if they will live up to their potential.  With the increasing popularity of Apple’s Macbook Air it seems likely that Ultrabooks will also find an audience, but ultimately consumers will decide what they want.

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Mike Dunn
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Mike graduated from University of Arizona with a degree in poetry, and made his big break by writing love sonnets to the…
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