It appears that the magic of Netbooks is coming to an end and has lost the kind of power it had earlier.  At least from the move taken by Lenovo, one gets this notion. Lenovo has stopped selling netbooks online, so if you had any online buying plans, you’ll have look for some other place to look for as Lenovo’s website is no more the place for you.  And the company hasn’t decided whether it’d starting the sales in the near future.

Lenovo is not the only company to take such a step; many other companies have taken similar decision on seeing consumers being less interested in netbooks over the time. With the availability of more technically strong tablets and mini-laptops at lower price tags, netbooks have seen dramatic drop in the sales. Dell too had stopped selling netbooks sometimes back, and the companies like HP and Acer have reduced their offerings.

Netbooks were a tremendous success but by the second half of the year 2010, their sales started declining, this actually started little by little after April 2010 when Apple’s iPad kindled the tablet market.

The total shipment of netbooks got reduced to 6.3 million in the fourth quarter of last year which was down by 29 percent or can be said to be just the third of what was sold in the fourth quarter a year back.

All the major netbook producing companies observed around 30% drop in the shipments and Lenovo alone found a shipment drop of 43%. However, netbooks are believed to be doing well in some parts of Latin America and Asia.

Right now the Lenovo’s site lists all its netbooks as “temporarily sold out – more stock is expected”.  But interestingly, Lenovo doesn’t seem to be changing its plan of releasing two of its S series netbooks namely S200 and S206 this June, which it announced last month during the CES 2012 in Las Vegas.

The Intel Corp’s plan to expand the market for their low-power processors meant for the tablets and smart phones, a segment dominated by ARM, couldn’t impress ARM Holdings plc, the head of British chip designer.

Though ARM considers Intel to be one of their chief competitors, they don’t find them impressive in their power efficient products. Warren East, ARM CEO confirmed at the CES 2012 that successfully ended at Las Vegas yesterday.

East regards the efforts put forward by Intel as “good enough” but not at all competitive to their designs.

“They (Intel) have taken some designs that were never meant for mobile phones and they’ve literally wrenched those designs and put them into a power-performance space which is roughly good enough for mobile phones,” East told the media at the CES.

Intel used the CES platform to announce their entrance into the smart phone and tablet chip market and unleashed their plans for Lenovo phones and Motorola Mobility using Google’s Android System based on new ‘Medfield’ chip from Intel.

ARM with their design licenses for 275 chip makers as well as hardware & software firms almost rules over the market and has nothing to fear from Intel’s market plans.

In fact, ARM has got Microsoft Corp running their all new Windows 8 OS on the tablets based on ARM chip designs coming up in the near future and is pretty happy to have the deal with the company that has been an important ally of Intel.

It was at the CES 2011 where Microsoft has announced their plans to come up with AMR compatible Windows 8, however no release date for the system was declared. ARM hasn’t any problem and is ready to wait as much as may be required.

“We’ve waited a long time for this to happen. Another six months, another 12 months doesn’t matter. “I’d much rather wait however long it takes to get a quality experience than compromise,” said East.

Samsung will bring their next-gen Samsung Series 5 Chromebook by upgrading it with dual-core Intel Celeron processor and doing away with the slower Atom N570 Silicon, informed a company representative at CES 2012 to the media.

It is believed that the new chip will work much better than the older one in opening the WebPages and will even help Series 5 Chromebooks make a better popularity.

However, rest of the specification including its 16GB solid state drive, 12.1 inch diagonal screen offering LED back lighting and 1280X800 resolutions, anti-reflective coating to improve the legibility when under the direct sunlight making the Chromebook offer 300-nits of brightness will remain quite the same.

You’ll also get two USB 2.0 ports, a 4-in-1 memory card reader, 1MP camera, a headphone out jack, and optional VGA dongle supporting special port.

Chromebook aims at running various applications, documents, and cloud settings giving easier user experience. But, it is notable that computers offering cloud-based technology sometimes become quite frustrating when the wireless connection is not up to the mark.

This also happens to be one of the reasons why Chromebook couldn’t be sold to that successful pitch to which the other prevalent Windows laptops do.

However, Samsung announced the release of Series 5 sometimes around the second quarter of the year at the CES. It will be available in two models one with the support for Wi-Fi + 3G and the other offering Wi-Fi connectivity alone. Pricing is yet to be made public though some estimation has already been made.

At the IDF last September, Intel had announced that their all new presentation named Classmate PCs would be featuring “Cedar Trail”, latest Atom processor from the company. Finally this year, at the CES 2012, Intel uncovered their new line of Classmate PC with lots of added improvements and of course featuring their Atom Cedar Trail CPU.

This new line of PC is going to be an excellent computing device especially developed for students.

Intel is guessing that with the presence of Atom Cedar Trail CPU, their brand new netbooks are going to offer a real great battery life of more than 10 hours when you have charged it well once.

The new Classmate PCs will give you more rugged exterior. The case has powerful corners to stay safe when there is any kind of banging. There are improvements made in the water resistance feature and you get really tough keys that cannot be poked out. The ports offered by the PC range include HDMI video output, USB 2.0, and audio jacks.

The screen of the Classmate PC is 10.1 inch in size and is made available in two forms: a traditional clamshell and a convertible tablet. It uses Intel’s Palm Rejection Technology to improve the writing experience. This improvement let the students to write directly on the screen with no risk of getting confused with their wrist pressure to be a stylus stroke.

There is a special Learning Series Software Suite loaded in it that offers more synergic classroom features together with those related to IT. Intel is quite aware of the fact that every classroom has different requirement, so you get options for various configurations for the Classmate PCs. You can decide whether you want your netbook to be packed up with Windows 7 32-bit or 64-bit along with the Learning Series software site from Intel loaded right on it.

Kapil Wadhera, the general manager of Education Market Platform Group, Intel suggested that the students facing the today’s competitive world need to be well-versed in various skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, and collaborative working and in the development of such skills, their technology solutions and educational suite would play a vital role.

Just a year back in the International Consumer Electronics Show, Intel was in the limelight talking about a state-of-art category of super-thin notebook computers, pretty popular today as Ultrabook. And this year it has some more futuristic technology to offer.

Intel, the world’s biggest computer chips maker has clearly displayed its intention of investing a whole lot of money, time, and effort in changing Ultrabooks into next generation computers and make them a phenomenal thing, at the CES 2012 going on in Las Vegas.

Intel looks forward to make their Ultrabooks gain large client base with its Apple’s MacBook Air like notebooks based on Microsoft’s Windows operating system (lightweight).  By supplying chips for Apple’s products, it knows quite a lot about their MacBook Air, but now it’s looking for enhancing the market for Windows-based notebooks right in the way as it is today for Apple’s device.

Intel showcased its concept Ultrabook named “Nikishki” at the CES 2012. You’ll find a huge touchpad just below its keyboard, which is of the same width as of the device and it allows the users to keep switching between the typing and touch gesture options quite easily.

Another interesting feature of this concept Ultrabook is its transparent touchpad, thus when you have closed the Nikishki, you get to see the laptop’s underside and through that very window you also get to view a portion of that computer’s display which will indeed a real cool way to have a look at your emails, calendar appointments, latest news and so on exactly the way you do with a smartphones!

This concept Ultrabook Nikishki is indeed a small but smart step toward making Ultrabooks computer like tremendous.

Mooly Eden, the VP & GM of Intel’s PC client group said that in the coming time touch technology won’t be restricted to the tablets and smartphones. He even suggested that keyboard present on the Ultrabooks would make them more versatile.

At a press conference held at Las Vegas on Monday, Intel announced that it is expecting to roll out 75 brand new Ultrabook designs in the 2012. Few of the devices got showcased at the show as well, out of which many look pretty attractive and come in MacBook Air like metallic cases.

The Consumer Electronics Show – 2012 or CES-2012 is all set to be open in Las Vegas for the consumers tomorrow, this 4 day long international electronics exhibition will be showcasing host of Ultrabooks, laptops, mobiles, TV sets, and  other digital products.

Microsoft is looking forward to have a really “dazzle” at the show with their all new Windows 8 operating system working on number of tablets. The company is said to be utilizing the platform to try out capturing the market which is already dominated by Apple.

Windows 8 is the effort of Microsoft to bring together their offerings for phones, tablets, desktops, and all in a single and uniform way and throw a challenge for Apple as well as Google with their suite that will attract both businesses and consumers.

Consumers are equally interested in the CES with 50 to 60 latest ‘Ultrabook’ laptops getting launched in the show.

The latest keyword of the show is “Smart” with the coming up of smarter digital and electronic products which will be seamlessly getting involved into your lives and replacing all the old-school products you had been using till now.

According to the surveys made and the preview of the CES 2012 yesterday, it is found that all the gadgets and gizmos that are going to see the world in these four days are going to be smarter than before and will even outsmart you in many cases!

About 140,000 people across the globe are expected to attend the tech exhibition with its opening in the Las Vegas Convention Center tomorrow. Similar to Apple’s iPhone & iPad, Amazon’s Kindle Fire, Microsoft’s Kinect and other latest tech gadgets, that have recently got launched several others are going to get showcased and even launched in the show.

CES 2012 is also expected to stimulate the growth of the tech market. The estimated tech device spending across the globe is to hit $1 trillion this year, something that has never been estimated before.

Hope you haven’t forgotten the AT200 tablet that Toshiba had announced at the IFA conference held in Berlin last year? Unfortunately, it never hit the market anyway, the company came up with its CES announcements yesterday and re-announced the 10.1 inch tablet and the best thing is that it now has its own official commercial name – Excite X10.

This incredibly thin device has a width of 7.7mm which happens to be about 1 mm thinner than iPad2 and Galaxy Tab. It sports aluminum back which makes it more uniquely snazzier compared to the other available tablets that come with plastic body which easily get smudged. Its IPS panel is covered with Corning Gorilla Glass and provides really wide viewing angles together with a native resolution of 1280X800. The processing in the device is done by a dual core 1.2GHz TI OMAP 4430. In the September of 2011, it was popularized to be superior to Tegra 2 from Nvidia, but now it’s the time that we got to check out how good it stands to quad-core Tegra 3 tablets.

It provides connectivity through 802.11n Wi-Fi; Bluetooth 4.0; micro-sized USB, SD & HDMI ports, doing justice with the slender profile of the device. Other features of the device include DLNA support, dual HD cameras 2MP on front and 5MP on the back offering 1080p video capture capability; GPS & built-in compass; stereo speakers with SRS. However, at the initial level, device won’t be offering any mobile broadband connectivity options.

Toshiba will be presenting their Excite X10 with Android 4.0 “Ice Creame Sandwich” once the device gets available in the market by first mid quarter of 2012. It will be available in two capacities namely 16GB and 32GB with $529 and $599 price tags respectively. Excite X10 will be Toshiba’s premium tablet offering along with the already existing devices making up their ‘mainstream’ options that will be available for $380 for 8GB, $400 for 16GB, and $480 for 32GB. A 4G AT&T HSPA+ option for 16GB device will also be offered by Toshiba at the CES at a price of $480, which won’t require any contract.

Other than its upcoming 10-inch tablet, Toshiba will also be displaying its Portégé Z835 Ultrabook at the CES starting this week. This 13.3 inch laptop will be offering a 1366×768 matte display, 128GB SSD, 4GB RAM, second generation Intel Core processors & Integrated Intel graphics, spill resistant keyboard, a full sized backlit & spill resistant keyboard. The internet connectivity will be offered by three USB ports each being USB 3.0, HDMI, VGA-out, Wi-Fi and Wi-Di. With its pricing starting at mere $819.

Hewlett-Packard has just announced two of its new desktop PCs when CES 2012 is just round the corner and one feels inundated with Ultrabooks announcements. Omni 27 all-in-one is one of them which is the first all-in-one model from the company which offers an impressively large 1080p LED-backlit display of 27-inch display. On the design front, it has the same Easel design as is offered by the TouchSmart all-in-one PCs from HP, with glass on the screen covering one edge to other; however you won’t find any touch screen in this case.

Omni27 sports 2.5GHz Sandy Bridge Core i5-2400S processor, s6GB RAM, integrated graphics, two USB 3.0 ports and Beats Audio. It originally comes packed with a DVD drive, but there is an option for Blu-ray player as well as TV tuner and HDMI input.

Omni also happens to be the first non-touch PC from HP and offers Magic Canvas software, the UI which was earlier known as TouchSmart and which then got tooled up again to be compatible with the non-touch devices. This will be taking on 27-inch iMac from Apple, pricing for which starts at $1,700, for US from January 8.

Pavilion Phoenix h9 is the second desktop PC which got announced yesterday. It is a “prosumer” system which is being publicized by HP as the most powerful Pavillion PC till now. The base model of the machine features an eight core AMD FX-8100 processor, a 160GB SSD, RAM of 8GB, and a Radeon 7670 GPU along with a VRAM of 1GB for $1,150.

One also gets the option to use Nvidia graphics, Intel’s enthusiast grade X79 processors, secondary hard drives and also liquid cooling.

HP has also unveiled three brand new business focusing monitors that include 23-inch Compaq L2311 with a built-in port replicator with a price tag of $319; along with LED-backlit LV1911 and LV2011 monitors available at more affordable prices of $125 and $135 respectively.

A leaked picture has come to our notice that has given some authenticity to the rumors related to the forthcoming smaller equivalent of Asus’ 10 inch Transformer Prime. Though it has not yet been made clear that would it be one or two of the 7 inch devices coming up with speculations around the 7 inch Transformer Prime as well as a refreshed version of the last year’s Eee Pad Memo.

However, the rumors around are confidently announcing that either one or may be a blend of the both will be making its presence during the Consumer Electronic Show this year.

The picture of the device published by Notebook Italia, an online media brought the device to the world which is quite similar to the Transformer Prime in terms of its aesthetics and has some resemblance with the Memo which is found to have bulkier edge. The rumor monger site is pretty sure that the mini Transformer will be introduced as a separate device but interestingly no specifications are revealed yet other than the commonly known ones like – a hardware keyboard attachment, Android (probably Ice Cream Sandwich), and a price tag which can easily be afforded (something like $299).

Notebook Italia seems quite sure that the overhauled Eee Pad Memo will be available with a capacitive display of 1280X800, Qualcomm Snapdragon Processor of 1.2Hz, an integrated flash memory of between 16GB to 64GB and Wi-Fi as well as 3G connectivity. And there’s also a possibility of Ice Cream Sandwich to be present at the time of the launch. Though extra details are yet to be made available, on the basis of the name of the device, it is being assumed that the device will be supporting pen input as well as the handwriting software.

These upcoming products from Asus will be competing with numerous other second-gen products in the 7 and 10 inch product range. Sadly, the market hardly looks any changed compared to how it was doing last year. However, it appears there will be a little less cluttering as some of the major playing PC makers would be concentrating on the Ultrabooks in place of tablets. But then, there are sure signs that the first half of 2012 will be ruled by Apple’s iPad & Amazon’s Kindle Fire and some of the Android devices that have made some place in the market.