Welcome to a laptop battery specialist of the Acer Laptop Battery
It's an absolutely gorgeous, sleek wedge of a laptop, clad in shining brushed metal. There's no DVD drive. The battery is sealed and nonremovable. The keys protrude through individual square holes in the laptop's deck. The multitouch trackpad is buttonless -- you get different clicks by pressing different spots. You generally need a separate adapter dongle if you want to connect to Ethernet or a VGA projector.
And there's no hard drive. Instead, you get a solid-state drive (SSD), which is like a giant memory card. It helps with battery life and fast start-up times.
Those expensive SSDs make ultrabooks ultra-expensive ($900 and up), and you get very little storage, usually 128 gigabytes. In a laptop with a regular hard drive, you can get eight times that storage, for a lot less money with battery like Acer TravelMate 2300 Battery , Acer Aspire 1680 Battery , Acer Aspire 1410 Battery , Acer TravelMate 4500 Battery , Acer LCBTP03003 Battery , Acer Aspire 1300 Battery , Acer Extensa 4620 Battery , Acer BTP-APJ1 Battery , Acer BTP-AQJ1 Battery , Acer BTP-ARJ1 Battery .
So what is an ultrabook? It's MacBook Air that runs Windows.
That's just about everybody's description -- except Intel, which developed the concept. ("Was the MacBook Air an inspiration for this category?" I asked Intel's P.R. team. "No," was the answer. "The Ultrabook category was conceptualized out of multiple rounds of research going back several years." Chalk up one for mind-blowing coincidence.)
Because of the tiny storage, an ultrabook doesn't make a good primary computer, and can store only wee photo, music and video collections. Forget high-horsepower games, too. And to install non-downloadable software, you'll have to buy an external DVD drive.
But never mind all that. If you have the money, you'll love how satisfying, beautiful and exquisitely designed these machines made by the major PC makers are. For most uses -- e-mail, Web surfing, chat, Microsoft Office, music, streaming movies -- an ultrabook is pure joy. If you can stop running your hands over the cool, polished metal.
A MacBook Air still has the best combination of design, screen, keyboard, trackpad and battery life. But ultrabooks come close, and they offer the advantages of choice. For example, ultrabooks come in larger screen sizes, like 14 inches (Hewlett-Packard) and 15 (Samsung). You can buy one with a nonglossy screen -- the colors aren't as vibrant, but you don't get annoying reflections. Most ultrabooks have dedicated keys that Apple leaves out, like Home, End, Page Up and Page Down.