 Hey guys, this is Joanna for The Verge and I am here inside the Verge CES 2012 trailer, but outside here in Vegas, it has literally been raining Ultrabooks. Okay, not literally, though I did get hit in the head with one yesterday, but there are a ton of Ultrabooks or thin and light laptops being announced at the show. Every computer manufacturer is jumping into the pool. Intel's talking about the future. So I wanted to give you guys a look at some of my favorite Ultrabooks here at the show and then give you a look at what's to come. So let's start here with the Samsung. This is the Samsung Series 9 and it's kind of apropos to start with it because last year at CES Samsung announced the Series 9 and this is a refresh to it, but it sort of kicked off the entire category. So what they've done here with the new one is they've coated it in aluminum. It's sort of a unibody or a certain, they're saying a shell of aluminum. Feels really nice in hand, really sturdy. It's also one of the thinnest to be announced, not even at the show, but just to be on market. So it's going toe to toe with the MacBook Air in terms of thickness. Feels really nice obviously and underneath you sort of get more premium specs than any of the other Ultrabooks. So this display is a 13 inch display with a beautiful Norton pop-up, but it's really bright. It's a 400 nit display with a 1600 by 900 resolution. It's also a matte display. So I sort of love this display if you cannot tell. And so overall underneath the lid you get here a nice keyboard, a nice touchpad, a nice experience I think. It's going to take some time to see how the touchpad works, but the thing is with the Samsung is that this is more expensive than any of the other Ultrabooks that are launching. This is a 1399 and there are going to be other SKUs that go up to 1599. So you get more premium specs here and you also get more of a premium build, but you've got to decide if you want to pay more. Moving on to HP's Envy Spectre 14 and this is again another sort of high end Ultrabook. It's going to go for 1399 as well, but what HP has done here is pretty crazy. They're basically using glass all over the system. This is a Gorilla Glass lid and then when you open it up you've got a glass touchpad and palm rest and a Gorilla Glass display. So it picks up a ton of fingerprints. This lid is sort of a fingerprint magnet. If you're a murderer you do not want to leave your fingerprints on there. Also a really nice display here from HP. This is a 1600 by 900 resolution display. Again really high resolution in comparison to the other Ultrabooks, but it's also got a radiance display which is sort of like an IPS equivalent for laptops. Just great viewing angles, really bright. So overall really nice in terms of build. HP has also put on its Beats Audio so you get this jog dial here on the left. Nice keyboard. The touchpad is a little bit stiff so we'll see how that works out, but again 1399 for a bit more of a premium system. It's also a little bit thicker because of the glass. So I wanted to then talk about the Dell. This is the new Dell XPS 13 and Dell is actually coming in at the lower end of the market. They are not pulling an Adamo here and blasting out the specs with a really thin design, but this is pretty thin. It is pretty light and it's going to start at $999. Overall it just feels like a nice system. It just feels kind of solid all around, a nice keyboard, a backlit keyboard, a nice big click pad. We'll see how that works though it's been working really well when I was testing it before. And you get a 13 inch display, but it's got a lower resolution than the others. In terms of specs on all of these, they're pretty much the same. You get a core i5 processor, basically standard on all of them, 4 gigabytes of RAM and 128 gigabytes solid state drive. And all of the Ultrabooks are required to have solid state drives or they're required to boot really fast and resume from sleep really fast to make that experience really nice. So that's basically the Ultrabooks of today. I wanted to give you a look at what's coming out later this year. So this is the Lenovo Yoga and it looks basically like a regular laptop. You've got a keyboard, you've got a touch pad, you've got a nice palm rest here that's made out of leather, ports on the side. But it's running Windows 8 and you can also flip it around and turn it into a tablet. So this morphs into a Windows 8 tablet, works really nicely actually for Windows 8 being such an early build at this point. So turn it into a tablet, I can also flip it around here and turn it into a tent of sorts. You can stand it up on a desk and something like that. So really interesting form factor from Lenovo. Obviously this isn't coming out until the Windows 8 timeframe which is probably not till the fall. But again this is the sort of thing we're expecting to see more of because Windows 8 is touch friendly and going to see a lot of these convertibles later in the year. So that overall is a good look at what I think the Ultrabook story here is at CES 2012. Welcome to the year of the Ultrabook.