The Ultrabook, powered by Ivy Bridge’s 22-nanometer technology with the company’s 3D Trigate transistors, is expected to be available in the first half of 2012.

Haswell technology for Ultrabooks – designed to reduce idle-platform power by more than 20 times over current design – will be introduced in 2013. It will offer more than 10 days of connected standby battery life.

Meanwhile, Ultrabooks with Sandy Bridge processors will be on the market later this year.

Speaking at the developer forum, the president and general manager of Intel’s PC Client Group Mooly Eden revealed that while cooperation between Intel and Microsoft was still solid, Android or other operating systems might yet be used for Ultrabooks.

“Original equipment manufacturers, based on the price application, decide what they want to do – which operating system to run on their Ultrabooks – and that is a decision of the market’s demand,” he said.

Eden said the price of Ultrabook would first be set below US$1,000 (Bt30,760), and it would gradually become cheaper.

“Everything is expensive when it starts, but it will go down,” he said, predicting that the price might decline to $799 or even less next year.

Intel also has a $300-million fund to invest in companies with the objective of driving the cost of Ultrabooks further down to an “affordable” level.

Eden said he believed Ultrabooks would take 40 per cent of the market, with notebooks taking the rest. Tablet computers were not direct competitors.

“We are not trying to compete with tablets, but to make the category interesting, so that people will replace their notebooks. Tablets and Ultrabooks are not enemies. I like the category and it is a different consumption device. Tablets are nice devices, if you want to share pictures or read e-mails or watch movies,” he said.

But he believes that despite the appeal of tablets, consumers still prefer to have a notebook for work purposes. “The two devices are not in direct competition. They complement each other.”

He said the market for netbooks was shrinking, because netbooks were being cannibalized by notebooks

Regarding the overall market for computing devices, Eden said the gloomy economy in the United States and Europe had contributed to a decline in sales.

“Every device is affected. Sales in the US and Europe are going down. Forecasts for growth are also going down,” he said.