Stories by: Melanie Pinola

Ultrabooks are sleek, super-thin laptops that often feature a silver, wedge or tapering design--yes, just like the Apple MacBook Air.

Lenovo has announced its new portfolio of business-friendly ThinkPad laptops, IdeaPad Ultrabooks, and IdeaPad multimedia laptops. Come June, it'll be raining Lenovo ThinkPads and IdeaPads.

Laptop manufacturers are hard at work updating their laptop lines and making new models using Intel's latest Ivy Bridge processors. If you're in the market for a new laptop, however, it may make more sense for you to buy a slightly older laptop running second-generation Sandy Bridge and save a few hundred bucks. Here's how to decide which purchase is your best option.

When Sony recently announced its first Ultrabooks, the Vaio T13 and Vaio T11, details for only the 13-inch model were provided, with no mention of pricing or Ivy Bridge processor availability for either model. Now German websites, including Sony's official German site, fills in those blanks.

Intel's third-generation processor family - code-named Ivy Bridge - have been launched but the first round of 13 of the quad-core chips was reserved for high-end desktops and laptops. These first-round chips will not go in mainstream computers or even trendy Ultrabooks.

ThinkPads have long set the gold standard for laptop keyboards, but recent Lenovo laptop models and leaked photos of upcoming ThinkPads indicate the legendary, classic ThinkPad keyboards are being replaced with a more trendy chicklet-style design.

Windows 8’s touch-centric interface will help to usher in a new wave of laptops with tabletlike touchscreens. To make it easier for users to tap and swipe on even superthin Ultrabooks, laptop makers will break out of the traditional clamshell shape and introduce laptops with more unusual designs.

With the superhigh-resolution third-generation iPad selling like hotcakes, and a refresh of the MacBook Air expected soon, Windows-based laptops are seemingly becoming a dying breed in this "post-PC," Apple-dominated era.

The resolution revolution is coming to Asus' Zenbook Ultrabooks soon, according to a spec sheet shared with technology publication, The Verge.

Acer has launched one of the first 15-inch Ultrabook laptops to date, the Aspire Timeline Ultra M3, at CeBIT. The Timeline Ultra M3 offers several hardware features of mid-size mainstream laptops -- such as an optical drive, discrete graphics card, and large 15-inch display, but in a thin Ultrabook package.