A source at Microsoft has confirmed that the devices are indeed official prototypes of laptops featuring a Kinect sensor. In terms of functionality, there are hundreds of different ways that motion control could be leveraged in a portable. Gaming has the most obvious applications, but a Kinect-enabled laptop could also toggle between programs with the wave of a hand, or media controls could be tweaked with the wag of a finger. What’s more, motion-controlled portables could offer a new way for disabled individuals to interact with their devices.

The more Ultrabooks that get unveiled here at CES, the more convinced I am that it’s silly to discuss them as if they were a coherent new class of portable computer. No two manufacturers seem to agree on what an Ultrabook should be. That’s neat, since it means they’re experimenting. And on Tuesday, Dell introduced my favorite answer so far to the question “What is an Ultrabook?” in the form of its new XPS 13.

The company is an old hand at building laptops that aim for a MacBook-air level of wafer-thin panache, having first tried its hand at the idea back in 2009 with its first Adamo. But the XPS 13 looks way better than the rather odd Adamos–and it doesn’t look much like a MacBook Air at all.

Closed, it’s only a slosh larger than 11.6″ version of the MacBook Air, a machine which, while neat, has a display that’s decidedly on the dinky size. Open the XPS up, though, and you see that it’s got a much more spacious 13.3″ screen. Dell says that the display is frameless” and “edge-to-edge.” That’s pushing the facts of the matter a bit, but the border is thin, allowing for the incorporation of a surprisingly big screen in a highly portable form factor. It also uses Corning’s Gorilla Glass, which protects it from damage and helps to reduce flex.

The system weighs in at just 2.99 pounds and is three-quarters of an inch thick; it has an aluminum lid and a carbon-fiber bottom. (The use of carbon fiber makes the XPS pleasant to hold and helps keep it cool, a plus if you do indeed use your laptop in your lap.) It has a backlit keyboard and a roomy touchpad, and you’ll be able to order it with an Intel  i7 processor and up to 256GB of solid-state storage, uncommonly powerful options for such a diminutive machine.

Like Apple (and unlike some other Ultrabook makers) Dell chose to cut down on the number of ports to make the XPS thin and small. It’s got one USB 3.0 port, one USB 2.0 one, and Mini DisplayPort, but there’s no built-in HDMI or slot for SD cards.

In person, this is an impressive computer. The fit and finish on the one I saw when Dell recently demoed the machine for me was impeccable, and the design elements just all come together in a manner that’s worthy of comparing to Apple even though there’s nothing particularly Apple-like about the aesthetics. It’s a computer that comes off as being comfortable in its own skin.

Pricing for the XPS 13 starts at $999–which seems reasonable given its posh feel–and Dell plans to ship it in late February.

When Intel started talking about the concept of Ultrabooks last year, I thought the definition was pretty simple: Ultrabooks were MacBook Air knockoffs that had Intel processors and ran Windows 7.

It turned out to be more complicated than that. Ultrabooks do use Intel CPUs–they’re Intel’s idea, after all–and they do run Windows. But not all of them bear much resemblance at all to the Air. Really, as long as PC makers design Ultrabooks to be fairly thin, they have lots of latitude to build different sorts of portable computers at different price points.

Case in point: Samsung’s Series 5 Ultra systems, the company’s first official Ultrabooks, which it’s announcing here at CES. There’s a Series 5 Ultra with a 14″ display. (Most Ultrabooks to date have been 13-inchers.) There are ones with 500GB hard disks. (Most Ultrabooks use pricey flash storage and max out at 256GB.) There’s even an optical drive option. (I’d assumed that every Ultrabook would ditch the drive in order to achieve the maximum possible razor-thinness.) And while there’s certainly a dash of Air-like look-and-feel to the industrial design, they’re not clones.

The Ultra comes in two sizes: The aforementioned 14″ one (starting at $949.99) and a 13.3″ version (starting at $899.99). Both have Intel Core i7 CPUs, and lots of ports, including USB 3.0 and 2.0, Ethernet. HDMI, and SD slots. The 14″ model is 3.94 pounds; the 13.3″ one is 3.24 pounds. Samsung claims up to seven hours of battery life for both versions.

Both models bear a familial resemblance to Samsung’s Series 9 from last year–a higher-end machine that was much more of an Air archrival. Samsung is also announcing new versions of the Series 9 here in Vegas; it’s still not calling them Ultrabooks, but they come off as a high-end take on the same notion–Super-Duper-Ultrabooks, if you will. The 13.3″ model ($1399) is 2.5 pounds and a half-inch thick. There’s also a new 15″ model–that’s an unusually big screen for a notebook that emphasizes thin, light design–that weighs 3.5 pounds and is also a half-inch thick.

Both of the new Series 9 models have black aluminum cases, 128GB solid-state drives, and 1600-by-900 displays. Samsung says that 15″ one has up to ten hours of battery life and the 13.3″ one gets up to seven hours. While the Series 5 Ultra systems look pretty slick, the Series 9 ones look really slick.

The Series 5 Ultra models will be available starting on January 30th; the Series 9 ones are due on February 27th,

Earlier today, Samsung proved that an Ultrabook can have all sorts of standard laptop features, such as a hard disk and an optical drive, and still be an Ultrabook. Now HP has announced its second Ultrabook–after last year’s Folio–and it too is trying carving off a unique niche. The new Envy 14 Spectre, which was just announced here at CES, is an Ultrabook for well-heeled enthusiast types who like lots of features and aren’t obsessive about their thin-and-light notebook being all that thin or all that light.

The Folio aimed for businesslike practicality rather than sizzle, but the Spectre carries over the luxe, fully-loaded feel of existing models in the Envy line. It’s got Beats audio (with a thumbwheel to adjust it). It has a light-up keyboard with individual LEDs for each key and a proximity sensor that illuminates them only when you’re there. It has up to 256GB of solid-state storage.

Speaking of luxe, the Spectre also comes with Adobe Photoshop. No, not Photoshop Elements–the full version of Photoshop. The one that sells for $699. (It also includes Premiere Elements.)

Like earier Envys, the Spectre bears an eerie resemblance to a MacBook Pro. However, its case boasts one feature I haven’t seen in any laptop before: It uses Corning’s Gorilla Glass, the same stuff that so many smartphone screens are made from. That gives it a unique glossy look and–HP says–makes it highly scratch-resistant. (I was worried that the glass might be prone to shattering if the system suffers a severe drop, but HP representatives told me that the system shouldn’t be any more fragile than any other notebook.)

One thing the Folio and the Spectre have in common is that both opt out of the quest for whisper-thinness. In fact, while the Spectre isn’t the least bit chunky, it doesn’t really look like an ultra-thin notebook at all. That’s because HP erred on the side of providing plenty of ports, including full-sized Ethernet and HDMI, plus Mini DisplayPort and USB 3.0. You should be able to hit the road with the Spectre without having to remember to tote a collection of dongles, as you might with a thinner notebook with less standard connections.

This Ultrabook may not be all that thin, but it’s other dimensions are interesting. That’s because HP crammed a 14″ screen into a case that you’ve expect to pack a 13″ display. It did so by tightening up the bezel, and the design makes for an uncommonly portable 14″ laptop.

The Spectre starts at $1399.99, which makes it a direct competitor of Samsung’s identically-priced new 13.3″ Series 9. Yet HP is calling the Spectre an Ultrabook, and Samsung doesn’t call the Series 9 an Ultrabook, even though it’s thinner and lighter than the HP. (The Spectre is “under four pounds.”)

As CES ramps up, we’re going to see Intel and hardware makers push the Ultrabook concept really hard. But really, an Ultrabook seems to be almost anything a manufacturer wants it to be, as long as it isn’t too thick and doesn’t have an AMD processor. If the Ultrabook concept doesn’t catch on with real people, maybe we can ditch the term and simply call machines such as the Envy 14 Spectre what they are: really nice-looking laptops.

.

The patents involve fuel cell technology, spurred, according to Apple’s filings, by “our country’s continuing reliance on fossil fuels.” That, argues Apple, “has forced our government to maintain complicated political and military relationships with unstable governments in the Middle East, and has also exposed our coastlines and our citizens to the associated hazards of offshore drilling. These problems have led to an increasing awareness and desire on the part of consumers to promote and use renewable energy sources.”  
 
Fuel cell technology isn’t new, but it could be groundbreaking in a laptop. Fuel cells are basically a way to convert the energy released from chemical reactions into electricity. They’ve been used in everything from NASA space satellites and probes to various types of vehicles, including automobiles, boats and submarines. The most common source of fuel cell energy is hydrogen, ergo the so-called “hydrogen car,” which couples oxygen and hydrogen to fuel the vehicle and produces little more than water as a byproduct.  
Apple’s patent filing describes a “portable and cost-effective fuel cell system for a portable computing device”:  

This fuel cell system includes a fuel cell stack which converts fuel into electrical power. It also includes a fuel source for the fuel cell stack and a controller which controls operation of the fuel cell system. The fuel system also includes an interface to the portable computing device, wherein the interface comprises a power link that provides power to the portable computing device, and a bidirectional communication link that provides bidirectional communication between the portable computing device and the controller for the fuel cell system.

 
Apple says a device powered by such a fuel system could run “for days or even weeks without refueling.” The system would theoretically be capable of both powering and receiving power from a rechargeable battery.  
“This eliminates the need for a bulky and heavy battery within the fuel cell system, which can significantly reduce the size, weight and cost of the fuel cell system,” reads one of the filings. “This fuel cell system includes a fuel cell stack which converts fuel into electrical power. It also includes a controller which controls operation of the fuel cell system.”  
 
[via AppleInsider]

[This post republished from Techland.]

How things have changed. Apple’s revamped MacBook Air became a runaway hit while the rest of the PC market stagnated, and suddenly every computer maker wants to make thinner, lighter and prettier products. Intel calls these creations “Ultrabooks,” and provided PC makers with strict criteria for weight, thickness, battery life, processor power and pricing to qualify for the marketing jargon. This new wave of notebooks run the latest Intel Core processors, cost around $1,000, and go toe-to-toe with the MacBook Air in physical measurements.

Over the next few months, a bevy of these machines will strut their stuff for laptop shoppers. Here’s what we know about every Ultrabook or similar product that’s on the market or on the way.

Acer Aspire S3

Availability: Now

Price: $900

Specs: 13.3-inch display (1366-by-768 resolution), Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM, 320GB hard drive and 20GB solid state, up to 6 hours advertised battery life

Dimensions: 0.51 inches to 0.68 inches thick, 2.98 pounds

Defining Features: Resumes from sleep in two seconds if napping for less than 30 minutes; lasts 50 days on standby power.

Reception: Critics weren’t thrilled. Laptop Magazine gave it 2.5 stars, and The Verge called it “an unfortunate first entry,” knocking its battery life, chintzy build materials, and flimsy keyboard.

Asus Zenbook UX21 and UX31

Availability: Now

Starting Price: $999 (11-inch), $1,099 (13-inch)

Base Specs: 11.6-inch (1366-by-768 resolution) or 13.3-inch (1600-by-900 resolution) display, Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM, 128GB solid state drive, up to five hours advertised battery life for the smaller model, or seven hours for the larger.

Dimensions: 0.67 inches thick tapering to 0.11 inches, 2.43 pounds (11-inch model); 0.71 inches tapering to 0.11 inches, 2.86 pounds (13-inch model)

Defining Feature: Thanks to its tapered design and aluminum finish, the Zenbook looks almost exactly like a MacBook Air.

Reception: The Zenbook fared well in reviews, with Engadget calling it “the Ultrabook [competitors] need to beat.” But it apparently shipped with a wonky trackpad that may or may not be whipped into shape by software updates. Some models are also hard to find in stock right now.

Toshiba Portege Z835

Availability: Now

Starting Price: $900

Base Specs: 13.3-inch (1366-by-768 resolution) display, Intel Core i3 processor, 4GB of RAM, 128GB solid state drive, up to 8 hours advertised battery life.

Dimensions: 0.33 inches to 0.63 inches thick, 2.47 pounds

Defining Feature: At Best Buy’s $800 asking price, it’s the cheapest Ultrabook yet.

Reception: I reviewed one for Techland, and liked it–especially the solid keyboard and smooth trackpad–although the vertical viewing angles are terrible. Probably the best lower-cost Ultrabook you’ll find for now.

Lenovo U300s

Available: November

Starting Price: $1050

Base Specs: 13.3-inch display with 1366-by-768 resolution, Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM, 128GB solid state drive, 8 hours of advertised battery life.

Dimensions: 0.59 inches thick, 2.9 pounds

Defining Features: Has “Clementine Orange” color option, RapidCharge restores half the battery in 30 minutes

Reception: Engadget praised the keyboard and trackpad, and The Verge said the U300s “proves you don’t have to copy Apple to make a beautiful laptop,” but the lack of an SD card slot could be a dealbreaker for photographers.

Also: A slightly thicker, heavier version of the U300s, dubbed the U300, will be available in November starting at $799

Lenovo U400

Available: Now

Starting Price: $849

Base Specs: 14-inch display with 1366-by-768 resolution, Intel Core i3 processor, 1 GB AMD Radeon HD graphics, 4GB of RAM, 50 GB hard drive, seven hours of advertised battery life, DVD drive

Dimensions: 4.36 pounds, 0.89 inches thick

Defining Feature: DVD drive, dedicated graphics

Reception: Although the U400 isn’t technically an Ultrabook–it’s much too thick and heavy to qualify–I’m including it here because it’s cut from the same cloth as the U300s, and manages to be pretty trim despite its optical drive and graphics card. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen any reviews yet.

HP Folio 13

Available: December 7

Starting Price: $900

Base Specs: 13.3-inch display, Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM, 128GB solid state drive, 9.5 hours of advertised battery life

Dimensions: 0.71 inches thick, 3.3 pounds

Defining Feature: It doesn’t look like a MacBook Air

Reception: Harry seemed to appreciate HP’s practical approach as an alternative to ripping Apple off. Battery life would be killer if it held up in real-world tests.

Samsung Series 9

Available: Launched in March, still in stock in some places

Starting Price: Was $1,149 (11-inch) and $1,649 (13-inch), but now cheaper.

Base Specs: Core i3, 2GB of RAM and 64GB solid state drive for the 11-inch model; Core i5, 4GB of RAM and 128GB solid state for the 13-inch model; 7 hours of advertised battery life

Dimensions: 0.62 inches thick, 2.3 pounds for the smaller and 2.88 pounds for the larger.

Defining Features: Wakes from sleep mode in three seconds, and the duralumin enclosure is stronger and lighter than aluminum

Reception: It launched earlier this year, so it’s really a prototype Ultrabook (Protobook?) instead of the real thing. Walt Mossberg approved of the Series 9’s high-quality materials and performance, but its battery couldn’t keep up the MacBook Air, and its starting price is expensive compared to Apple’s machines. Prices haven’t come down enough to rival today’s Ultrabooks, either.

Sony Vaio Z

Available: Now

Starting Price: $1,750 and up

Base Specs: 13.1-inch display with 1600-by-900 resolution, Intel Core i5 processor, 4 GB of RAM, 128 GB solid state drive, 7.5 hours of advertised battery life

Dimensions: 0.66 inches thick, 2.5 pounds

Defining Features: Not technically an Ultrabook, it’s the lightest machine on this list, and includes a docking station with a discrete graphics card and DVD drive (Blu-ray optional).

Reception: Wired raved about the Vaio Z’s display and performance, but panned its loud fan, disastrous touch pad and price “equivalent to feeding thousands of starving children for a month.”

Dell Thin-and-Light

Available: 2012

Price: Unknown

Specs: Intel’s next-gen Ivy Bridge processors, perhaps

What we know: This rumor comes from CNet’s Brooke Crothers, who says Dell may announce a MacBook Air rival at CES 2012. Dell tried this one before with the Adamo line and failed, but as Crothers notes, so did Apple. The difference is that Apple kept working at the design, performance and battery life, while Dell put the idea on ice.

Samsung Ultrabooks

Available: Late 2011, supposedly

Price, Specs and Defining Features: Unknown

What we know: The rumormongers at DigiTimes reported in September that Samsung is preparing two Ultrabooks, one of which will be outsourced to Quanta Computer. Given that we’ve heard nothing from Samsung since then, I’m thinking the company is holding off until 2012.

Sony Ultrabook

Available: Late 2011, supposedly

Price, Specs and Defining Features: Unknown

What we know: Sony hasn’t announced any Ultrabook plans, but that didn’t stop Intel CEO Paul Otellini from saying Sony would release a thin-and-light by the end of 2012. Unfortunately that’s all we know.

That accounts for most of the major laptop makers in the United States, showing just how serious Intel is about getting its partners on board. But if you’re eyeing an Ultrabook, consider this: Come mid-2012, a second wave of Ultrabooks will arrive, using Intel’s Ivy Bridge processors for much better battery life and performance. Some of them may even have touch screens to take advantage of Windows 8′s tablet interface–at least according to Intel’s plans. As with the iPad rivals of 2010, I can’t wait to see how the MacBook Air alternative market shakes out.

Let’s start with Dell; I go to dell.com and search for a laptop. I want something like a 13″ MacBook Air, so I tick “11 to 14 inches” and “< 5 lbs,” Dell’s ultralight category. I get back three largely indistinguishable machines, ranging from $999 to $1359. What’s the difference between them all? I don’t know, they all look like variants of the “Alienware M11x.” It’s confusing and overwhelming, not helpful.

It’s even worse if I just browse without searching. The options I get are just… meaningless. Yes, I want “Everyday Computing,” so I want an Inspiron. But hang on, I also want “Design & Performance,” so I want an XPS. Wait a second, I want “Thin & Powerful,” too. So maybe I want a Z Series? But the only line that apparently matches my broad search criteria—lightweight, 11-14″—I wouldn’t even consider because I don’t want a “gaming” laptop, and so I’m never going to click Alienware!

Is this the best way to sell laptops? Create a bunch of categories with arbitrary, overlapping labels, and just hope that buyers manage to fight through the system to find something that isn’t wretched?

Last Thursday morning, as I packed for a three-day trip to San Diego for Comic-Con, I couldn’t decide whether to take my trusty first-generation MacBook Air, or use the trip as an excuse to review Samsung’s Series 5 Chromebook, which I’d just received. So I didn’t decide–I took both.

And then, once I’d arrived at the airport, I realized that I’d forgotten to bring the Air’s AC adapter. The Blogging Gods clearly wanted me to try the Series 5, one of the first commercially-available devices that runs Google’s Chrome OS.

The notion of using a laptop purely as a window to the Web–which is the Chrome OS proposition–isn’t inherently unappealing to me. (In fact, I tried to do just that back in 2008, in a project I called Operation Foxbook, long before Google announced Chrome OS.) Using Google’s first Chromebook, last year’s experimental CR-48, had left me more skeptical about Chrome OS rather than less so. But I still want to be impressed with a truly Web-centric computing device. Sadly, my time with the Series 5 at Comic-Con was frustrating in multiple ways. Google and its hardware partners are selling Chromebooks to the public at prices which aren’t lower than those for similar Windows laptops, but the Series 5, like the CR-48,still feels like an experiment.

If the $499.99 Series 5 were a Windows 7 machine, it would probably be a pleasing one. The black-and-white case of the one I have looks good, and it’s reasonably thin at .8″. The keyboard is full-sized and comfy. 12.1″ is an appealing screen size–highly portable, yet without the crammed feeling of a netbook. I had trouble with the touchpad (see below), but it’s surprisingly spacious.

This is a Chromebook, though, and one of the defining aspects of a Chromebook is that it doesn’t really work without Internet access. (It’s possible to listen to music using the bare-bones media player, and Google is working on limited-function offline versions of part of the Google Apps suite.) I figured I could still be OK: after all, I spend around 85 percent of my time using Web apps such as WordPress.com anyhow. I would just use Google Docs instead of my favorite word processor, Scrivener, and something like the Web-based graphics suite Aviary instead of Photoshop.

News coverage of Comic-Con leaves the impression that everyone there is strolling about dressed as a superhero–or, at least, is attending a preview of a major upcoming superhero-themed movie. No, not really. I spent much of my time in small rooms attending interesting panels with folks such as veteran cartoonists. And while I listened, I tried to do my day job, by blogging and answering e-mail.

The San Diego Convention Center has free Wi-Fi, and the Series 5 I tried has embedded Verizon Wireless 3G. That gave the Series 5 two ways to get online–and much of the time, either or both of them worked fine. I blogged. I browsed around. I tried out apps from Google’s Chrome Web Store. I mostly liked the user interface–I spend so much time online that using a browser as the primary interface makes sense to me, and Google does so in a thoughtful way. (The way Chrome OS manages multiple windows–a sort of stripped-down-but-slick equivalent to OS X’s Spaces–is especially well done.)

The Series 5′s battery life was terrific, too–if it didn’t hit Samsung’s estimate of “up to” 8.5 hours on a charge, it came mighty close.

Trying to do graphics for Technologizer using a Web app, however, was a fundamentally unsatisfying experience. Aviary is impressive in many ways, as are competitors such as Google’s own Picnik. But none of them are as swift as a good image editor that’s a piece of traditional software. I felt like I was working in slow motion. (Aviary, actually, didn’t work at all for my purposes: after I’d resized and cropped an image, I couldn’t save it as a JPEG file for use on Technologizer. In Chrome for OS X, it worked just fine.)

The Aviary file-save glitch was the only instance I noticed of a Web site that should have worked on the Chromebook failing to do so. Flash-enabled sites such as Amazon’s video on demand service performed adequately, which was a pleasant change from my experience with them on Android handsets and other mobile devices. And I knew that Netflix Watch Instantly wouldn’t work–it requires Microsoft’s SilverLight–so I wasn’t startled when it didn’t. (If you log into Netflix on a Chromebook, you get a version of the site focused entirely on the DVDs-by-mail service.)

Worse, I quickly figured out that:

• I couldn’t get on the free Wi-Fi at all in some parts of the cavernous building, and when I did get on, the Wi-Fi would often die for no apparent reason, and stay dead for extended periods. (This didn’t come as a surprise–if there’s a major convention center on the planet with truly robust wireless service, I haven’t been there.)
• The Verizon coverage inside the building is also shaky. (This didn’t come as a surprise, either: at the 2010 con, my Verizon Mi-Fi often failed to get me onto the Internet.)

End result: I spent a lot of time futzing with the Series 5, hoping that I could coax it into reconnecting to the Internet. Sometimes I succeeded; often I failed. When I failed, I closed the notebook and paid attention to the con.

If the Series 5 had been a cheap Windows laptop, I would have presumably had the same connectivity woes, but the lack of Internet access would have been aggravating but not devastating. I could have used a word processor, an image editor, or a fancier music player than the rudimentary one built into Chrome OS. The Chromebook, however, might as well have displayed a picture of a boat anchor when it couldn’t find the Internet.

Even when I was online, I had trouble with Chrome OS. Google’s Chromebook site talks about Chrome OS laptops avoiding “all the headaches of ordinary computers.” Which they sort of do–it’s just that the Series 5 turned out to have a bunch of headaches of its own.

To wit:

• The touchpad is much, much better than the one on the CR-48–and much, much worse than the ones on Macs and on most Windows laptops. I often had considerable trouble selecting and dragging items, although I couldn’t tell whether poor functionality or bugs–or both–were to blame. (I do assume that it’s a software issue rather than a hardware one.)
• Individual browser tabs crashed frequently, with a cutesy “He’s dead, Jim!” message that said memory issues might be to blame.
• Sometimes–quite often, actually–clicking on links on pages didn’t do anything.
• On more than one occasion, the keyboard froze until I rebooted the Series 5.
• On more than one occasion, Chrome extensions stopped working until I rebooted the Series 5. In other instances, I got error messages telling me that extensions had crashed. (I haven’t seen the same sort of extension difficulties with the same extensions on the Chrome browser.)
• When I stuck an SD card full of photos into the laptop–hoping to edit one of them and upload it into a blog post–the laptop couldn’t see the card until I rebooted.
• When I started using the Chromebook, references in the help to a File Manager option in the Tools menu befuddled me–it wasn’t there, and pressing, which was supposed to pull it up, did nothing. Later, the File Manager showed up, possibly after I’d gotten the machine to notice the SD card.

At one point, the Chromebook seized up altogether, suffering a sort of Blue Screen of Death without the blue screen. When I rebooted it, I briefly saw a message that said that the preferences file was corrupt or invalid. Maybe a damaged preferences file caused some of the glitches I encountered. But I’m not sure how it got damaged, or how to fix it. (A Google representative contacted me about the issues after I mentioned them on Google+: I’ll let you know if the company helps me figure out what’s going on.)

My friend Louis Gray is using a Series 5 and says the experience is largely trouble-free, and so pleasing that he rarely uses his Mac anymore.  Still, the oddities I’ve seen may also stem from bugs, plain and simple. One of Chrome OS’s selling points is that Google can push down updates and have a Chromebook silently auto-install them, much as Chrome-the-browser does. As with major new versions of Windows and OS X and other operating systems, waiting a bit will surely get you a more reliable Chrome OS.

But a Chromebook that behaves as intended will be almost entirely dependent on the Web. You have to find a Wi-Fi hotspot. Or pay for 3G, once you’ve used up the 100MB of free monthly Verizon service you get for the first two years–which you can do in a few hours even if you’re not doing anything that’s particularly bandwidth-hungry. And if you can’t get online, as I often wasn’t in the nation’s ninth largest convention center, you’re toast.

In other words, Chrome OS and Chromebooks are built for an era of genuinely pervasive Internet access and all-powerful Web apps that isn’t here yet. If that age arrives at all, it will take years, not months.

For now, using the Series 5 has given me new appreciation for Windows 7 notebooks that offer Chromebook-like hardware at a Chromebook-like price. (My pals at Laptop Magazine, in their Series 5 review, suggest Asus’s Eec PC 1215B.) Sure, Windows 7 has all the downsides that Google is fond of enumerating: bloat, security issues, update difficulties, and more. The only thing is, Chrome OS is still too short on upsides of its own.

Will Chrome OS get the opportunity to become great? It’s tough to say. Google cofounder and new CEO Larry Page says that the company is going to put more wood behind fewer arrows–which presumably means that at least a few additional projects that aren’t established successes will be going bye-bye. I’m honestly vague on whether Page and other Google powers that be see Chrome OS as a strategic necessity or an arrow that might not make the cut.

Seems to me that an affordable laptop that ran Google’s Android would make more sense in the real world than any Chrome OS device. It could be mean, lean, and browser-centric–and give you the ability to run apps that weren’t dependent on Internet access. This idea is so obvious that I’d be staggered if it hasn’t occurred to people within Google. And if the company decides that two mobile operating systems are one too many, isn’t it clear which one will go and which one will stay?

When Steve Jobs unveiled the first MacBook Air at Macworld Expo back in January of 2008, he induced lots of oohs and aahs over its astoundingly thin case. I don’t, however, remember many people declaring that it was Apple’s first pass at building the garden-variety Mac of the future. I sure didn’t–in part because I was too busy bemoaning the things that it lacked, such as built-in Ethernet.

Super-thin laptops similar in concept to the Air have been around since at least Digital’s 1994 HiNote Ultra. People have usually assumed that they were aimed at well-heeled businesspeople with decidedly undemanding computing needs–or at least at folks whose real computer is something brawnier and more feature rich.

Today, Apple is releasing two new Airs, the successors to the much-improved ones it rolled out last October. It isn’t pitching the new models as specialty machines. Even more than with their predecessors from last year, it’s treating them as well-rounded, versatile computers that happen to be really thin and really light. In fact, a tagline it’s using–”The ultimate everyday notebook”–doesn’t even mention their lack of bulk. And just to clarify things, it’s discontinuing the last machine in its lineup that was simply called a MacBook. From now on, if you want a Mac portable, you’ll choose between a MacBook Air and  a MacBook Pro.

For the past few days, I’ve been reviewing a 13″ model loaned to me by Apple, but I didn’t need any arm-twisting to accept the notion of it as a mainstream notebook. I’ve already been using its predecessor as my primary system since last fall, dual-booting it between OS X and Windows 7. (And spending a fair amount of time explaining to curious passers-by that it really is the computer I spend most of my time on.)

It’s been exactly nine months since Apple announced the most recent 11″ and 13″ Air models, so it’s no shocker that today’s updated models aren’t radical departures from their predecessors. Their aluminum unibody cases are all but unchanged, as are the quoted weights (2.38 pounds for 11″ and 2.96″ for 13″, or very, very slightly heavier than the previous models) . The sealed-in batteries have the same quoted lives as before. The screen resolutions are the same. The starting price point and most basic configuration–$999 for an 11″ Air with 2GB of RAM and 64GB of solid-state storage–are the same.

Really, there are four major new features:

• The processors. The previous-generation Airs’ Core 2 Duo CPUs have given way to faster Intel i5 “Sandy Bridge” chips with Intel 3000 integrated graphics and 1333-MHz DDR3 memory. (The earlier models had NVidia’s GeForce 320M graphics and 1066-MHz DDR3 memory.) Apple, as is its wont, touts the new systems as “up to 2X faster” than the earlier ones. I didn’t do any formal benchmarking of the 13″ Air I reviewed, but it felt consistently snappy. (The Airs’ use of solid-state flash memory instead of rotating hard drives contributes hugely to their brisk feel.)
• Thunderbolt. The new Airs don’t have any additional ports, but they’re replaced the Mini DisplayPort connectors on the old models with Thunderbolt, the technology invented by Intel and championed by Apple. That’s potentially a big deal: Thunderbolt’s do-everything design is compatible with DisplayPort and Apple’s adapters for various types of monitors, but it also does USB-like data transfers, at up to 20 times the speed of USB 2. Right now, there are only a smattering of Thunderbolt products out there (Apple sells a cable for Mac-to-Mac connections, and LaCie has announced a hard drive.) But the presence of Thunderbolt ports on millions of MacBook Airs will presumably help encourage hardware manufacturers to make Thunderbolt devices. [UPDATE: Apple also announced a 27" Thunderbolt display today.]
• A backlit keyboard. The original 2008 Air had one; the 2010 versions didn’t. It’s back, and it’s awfully handy for typing in dim environments, such as red-eye flights.
• Lion. You can pay just $29.99 to put Apple’s nifty, iPad-inspired OS X upgrade on a Mac you already own, but these MacBook Airs are the first new Mac models to come with it preinstalled.

Here’s a quick guide to the standard versions of the two new Air models:

(The battery claims in the chart above are Apple’s, for Wi-Fi surfing usage. I performed no scientific battery testing, and will be interested to see what more methodical testers such as Macworld find.)

Apple also offers some build-to-order options, including an 11″ Air with 256GB of storage (up from a maximum of 128GB previously) and both the 11″ and 13″ versions with an even more potent Intel processor: the 1.8-GHz Core i7.

It doesn’t pay to fixate on the Airs’ specs, though. For one thing, like I say, their use of flash memory makes them radically zippier than they’d be if they were the same computers, but with hard disks: every time I load Photoshop and find it ready to go in about five seconds, I smile. I keep trying to stumble across a task or two that will prove that an Air is just too wimpy for some folks, but I’ve failed so far: it’s even okay for the not-terribly-sophisticated video editing I do in iMovie.

And ultimately, these computers’ defining characteristics don’t have that much to do with clockspeeds and related geekery. It’s all about what Apple built in, what it left out, and the virtues of computers that are so portable that you can forget you’ve got one tucked under your arm.

The downside of flash memory, of course, is that it’s costlier and more cramped than a hard drive. Even the fully-loaded 256GB Air is a bit short on space by current standards, although I’ve found that I can live happily enough with it as long as I prune unwanted files fairly regularly and archive some stuff I rarely need to an external drive.

How about all of the features that the Air lacks? When I’m out and about I rarely miss them. For my own Air, I splurged on an external DVD burner, but have only needed it about three times to date. (Two of those instances were when I wanted to install Windows 7 and Adobe Creative Suite CS5.) I have Apple’s USB Ethernet adapter, but have only used it to ensure high-quality Skype video when I’ve guested on TWIT.

Airs are also devoid of user-installable upgrade capability: if you want 4GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, you’ll need to buy them now or forever hold your peace. My own Air has just 2GB of RAM, and I’ve occasionally felt an obligation to bristle at the fact that it can’t be upgraded to 4GB. But you know what? It’s not a real problem. The machine isn’t perceptibly slower than the 4GB MacBook Pro I once used.

Of course, you may want an optical drive built into your laptop. Or a great big hard disk, or a profusion of ports, or a bigger display, or something that comes in at a lower price. That’s fine; lots of people do, and notebooks that have all of the above and more aren’t going anywhere. But the Airs don’t suffer from the traumatic compromises traditionally associated with machines in their class.

You might also be interested in an Air-like system built to run Windows–and there you might run into trouble. The MacBook Air hasn’t proven as influential as I might have expected among Windows laptop makers, a group of companies who usually err on the side of more stuff at lower prices over Apple-style elegant minimalism. Windows machines that bear any resemblance to the Air at all tend to be cheaper and chunkier. Or, like Samsung’s Series 9 and Sony’s Z Series, slick but pricier than an Air. (What was that about an Apple Tax again?)  Or, like Dell’s Adamo, just plain unsuccessful. I hope that the new Airs inspire Apple’s competitors to try again.

My list of Air nitpicks is short. If these laptops were available with embedded 3G (or 4G) wireless, I’d be thrilled–and since Apple can build it into an iPad, I figure that it’s possible to squeeze it into a Mac. I also regret the absence of a slot for SD memory cards on the 11″ model; if it had one, I might pick that even more portable Air over its 13″ friend, which does have an SD slot. Then again, if Apple ever decided to build a 14″ or 15″ Air, I’d consider that, too.

Mostly, though, I think that these are the terrific portables that Apple set out to build. By sticking with the Air concept and refining it, the company is redefining what an everyday notebook is–and I suspect that it’s just getting started with this idea.

Over at CNet, Brooke Crothers checked Amazon’s list of best-selling laptops, and found the number four spot occupied by Acer’s 11.6-inch, $349 Chromebook. (It’s in fifth place as I type). Only Apple’s MacBook Pro and a pair of Toshiba laptops ranked higher. Samsung’s Series 5, a 12.1-inch Chromebook with built-in 3G service for $499, is ranked 10th.

Amazon’s sales charts don’t necessarily signify that Chromebooks are a hit. There are lots of other places to buy laptops, and PC makers tend to sell many different models, reducing the chances that any particular one will dominate. But the chart does at least prove that Chromebooks aren’t a failure. People are actually buying them.

That wasn’t a guarantee. Chrome OS is little more than a web browser, and Chromebooks generally are more expensive than netbooks, despite having no support for installed software and hardly any local storage.

And yet, for a significant number of Amazon customers, that’s okay. What Chromebooks lack in tech specs, they make up for with big trackpads, solid keyboards, slim designs and long battery life. Increasingly, those attributes are becoming more important than raw performance, especially when all you’re doing is browsing the Web.

Still, I’d like to see Google take the concept further with built-in online storage that could integrate into the browser just like a local hard drive. Either way, Chrome OS is interesting to me, and seems worthy of further exploration both by Google and hardware makers. Strong sales are a good way to ensure that’ll happen.