Ulatranotebooks – Going Notepads One Better

One of the big questions longtime portable computer users have been asking about the iPad and other notepads by other makers is, what about typing? After all, everyone knows that most laptops, notebooks, etc. are bought by either students or business people, both of whom generally need to do a reasonable amount of typing. And everyone knows that typing text is the one thing that an iPad does not do well. Enter, the Ultranotebook, a term coined and pushed by none other than Intel, the giant chip maker. It's a sort of notepad, but it's also got a permanent keyboard.

According to Gizmodo, the Ultranotebooks look like really, really thin laptops and are as light as a notepad, and some of them at least, have touchscreens in addition to keyboards and associated touchpads; all in response to the huge sales gains by notepads and the resultant loses in sales of laptops. So it seems, with an Ultranotebook, you can have your cake and eat it too.

Ultranotebooks are apparently creating quite a bit of buzz at this year's Computer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Wired Magazine's Gadget Lab goes so far as to say that Ultranotebooks are dominating the show in much the same way notepads did last year, which could mean dire things for them if consumers decide they really do want to type after all.

And if that's not enough Michael Humphrey, columnist for Fortune, and self-professed lover of the iPad, writes in a recent article that his new Ultranotebook almost seems to make having an iPad rather superfluous.

Such sentiments surely mean there is change in the air once again. Where just months ago the computer media seemed ready to declare the PC including the workhorse laptop, a dead beast due to the new-fangled notepad. Now however, it seems such declarations might have been not only premature, but misguided. After all, such declarations were made by the very people the new Ultrabooks are meant to woo; people that need a keyboard to get their work done. Who needs that more than those who write for a living?

This won't be the end of the story of course, because there will always be a great divide in the computer universe between those who use their computer, in whatever form, to merely look at stuff, i.e. web pages, YouTube, etc. and those who see the device as a means of inputting data, i.e. writing, spreadsheet and/or database manipulating, which means, we could very well find that we will wind up with two different but similar types of computers to choose from. Those with a keyboard, and those without.