Stories by: Jason Cross

The trend in laptops at CES 2012 is clear: It’s all about thinner and lighter laptops made with premium materials and slick design. Intel’s attempt to brand exceptionally thin and light laptops as Ultrabooks has been very successful, with nearly every laptop vendor jumping on board. Even laptops that don’t meet the requirements of Ultrabook branding, such as those using Intel Atom or AMD CPUs like the Asus Eee PC Flare, are slimmer, lighter, and better-looking than the comparable systems of the last few years.

Last spring, Samsung impressed me by kicking off its high-end luxury Series 9 brand with an incredibly thin and light laptop. It was a fantastic competitor to the Macbook Air that came months before every laptop maker started cranking out Ultrabooks. In some ways, you could even call it the "proto-Ultrabook". So if you're Samsung, and everybody else has a similarly slim laptop on the way, what do you do for an encore?

In a rather surprising move, Microsoft has announced the release of an official Xbox Live app for iOS. The universal app is free and formatted for both iPhone and iPad.

Tablets and smartphones are in, but don't count laptops out. Impressive new laptops planned for 2012 promise to be thinner, lighter, and faster, as well as to carry longer-lasting batteries.

At just 2.4 pounds, the Toshiba Portege Z835 is the lightest of the first wave of Ultrabooks. Most, like the Lenovo IdeaPad U300s and Asus Zenbook UX31E, weigh around 3 pounds. You can immediately feel the difference when you pick up this light-as-a-feather laptop. Unfortunately, this Best Buy exclusive configuration makes a few obvious concessions to reach its attractive $799 price.

Microsoft has spent so much time at the BUILD conference this week talking about how Windows 8 will operate like a tablet OS that you might feel left out if you plan to continue working on a desktop or laptop. But whether you're an IT manager, PC enthusiast, or professional just trying to get some work done, Windows 8 will have enough new features to make it worth your interest.

The buzzword is "reimagine" here at Microsoft BUILD conference where Windows 8 is being shown for the first time in detail to developers and the media. Reimagine refers to the operating system's radical new look, new support for tablets, revamped Start Screen, and integration of a new class of "metro-style" applications. --

We already know a lot about Windows 8. We know it’ll have a new, touch-focused interface and application framework for tablets and touchscreen PCs. We know it will still have a traditional desktop, with enhancements to Explorer (among other features). It will have versions that run natively on ARM-based CPUs in addition to the x86 architectures we’re used to. It will integrate USB 3.0 support and cloud services.

Remember when the "cloud" was just called the "Internet?" This absurd fascination with naming online services after suspended atmospheric condensation is kind of driving me nuts. For around 14 years, millions of people have used Hotmail, but they didn't use a "cloud email solution." When we were all ripping our CDs a decade ago and looking up track information on the CDDB, we weren't using a "cloud music information service." Look, it's just the Internet, people. We don't need a new word to say that data is stored on a central server. I can't wait for the day when "cloud" joins the dustbin of overused and meaningless technology marketing words, along with push, virtual reality, and multimedia.

Samsung's Series 9 laptop isn't the first Windows-bearing PC to try to steal Apple's MacBook Air limelight. Remember the troubled Adamo from Dell, set to compete with the first-generation Air? At less than three pounds and 0.7 inch thick, the Series 9 is trying again where Dell slipped up the first time. While the Adamo offered inferior hardware at a dramatically higher price than Apple, Samsung at least gets the hardware part right, and narrows the price gap a little. The Series 9 is costlier than the competing 13-inch MacBook Air with a starting price of $1649 (compared with Apple's $1299), but it offers mostly superior hardware and is eminently usable.