If 2011 was remembered for shiny new tablets that made people part with their hard-earned cash, then 2012 may just be the one where the craze for these thin and light yet powerful and affordable ultrabooks takes off big time.

At the annual CES show just concluded earlier in the week, a good number of laptop makers joined the fray with their takes on what people would be carrying to meetings and classrooms in the coming months.

Perhaps having seen Asus, Acer and Lenovo whip up demand for such ultra-light PCs in the closing months of 2011, the likes of Sony, Dell and HP showed of their versions of the ultrabook at CES this year. Lenovo too came up with a quite surprising “yoga-like” ultrabook cum tablet.

Here’s a sneak peek.

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If you’re a fan of Dell’s Alienware range of “bling-in-on” gaming desktops, you’d be happy to hear that the PCs now come with Intel’s top-end Core i7-3960X or Core i7 3930K six-core CPUs in Singapore.

On the new Alienware Aurora R4 desktop, the LGA2011-based CPUs are water-cooled, and factory-overclocked to between 3.9GHz and 4.1GHz as well, which seem alright, unless you’re the type who regularly pour liquid nitrogen into your PC for extreme speed.  …

Asus and Acer may have been slightly earlier to the game, but the battle for the slimmest, lightest and most powerful laptop is just getting hotter with new arrivals like Toshiba’s new Portege Z830.

Shown to the media in Singapore last week, the latest in the Japanese laptop maker’s thin-and-light Portege line is just 15.9mm thin and weighs a feather-light 1.12kg. On that frame are a 13.3-inch screen and 128GB solid state drive, along with either an Intel Core i5 or Core i7 chip. …

The ultrabook market just got more crowded with ASUS joining the party; the Taiwanese company officially jumped into the fray when it unveiled the super-thin Zenbook laptop here in Singapore on Tuesday.

The Zenbook sports a differentiating design with some remarkable innards while keeping the price relatively reasonable. But will this Windows 7 beauty stand up against its competition? We go hands-on to find out more! …

Gamers and road warriors have some new toys to look forward to this November. Samsung has released their new Series 7 Gamer and Chronos notebooks into Singapore – just in time for the tons of new games coming this Christmas.

The Gamer is loaded with sick specs, beginning with an Intel i7 quad core chip with 8GB of RAM, up to 16GB.  More interestingly, it comes with one of the most powerful graphic cards on the market – the AMD Radeon HD 6970M 2GB GDDR5 with DirectX 11 support.

As if that was not enough, Samsung also has added an extra 8GB to the notebook through its ExpressCache system, which effectively acts as an extra 8GB of flash memory on the motherboard, allowing for faster caching that translates into faster startup and application launch speeds. …

Let’s start by getting the price of this state-of-the-art laptop out of way, because S$3,999 is certainly not everyone’s idea of how much a good laptop should cost.

No, not even with the full works – a Core i7 chip, 8GB RAM, a 256GB solid state drive – encased in an incredibly thin and light frame weighing just 1.165kg, plus a separate desktop dock that contains a Blu-ray drive and a handy AMD 6650M graphics card.

Considering how laptops are costing less by the day, I’m not sure how many of the new Vaio Z – which costs twice as much as many albeit lower-powered rivals – will get sold here in Singapore.

But what makes this Sony machine so impressive is that it might just herald a new generation of devices. While the previous Vaio Z was a well-built, fast machine for the business user, the new incarnation is a whole new class of device altogether, in that it is both a PC on the go and on the desk. …

Unless you’ve been living in the deep recesses of a Linux terminal somewhere in Antarctica, you would know that Apple has released the newest version of their operating system, OS X Lion, ahead of schedule. But it’s not Lion in which I’m interested.

Along with new software comes new hardware, and Apple has upgraded the MacBook Air to become more powerful than before. They’ll be phasing out the iconic white MacBook a little down the road. For all intents and purposes, the MacBook Air is now Apple’s most consumer-ish offering. …

Apple’s iMac has just got a much-needed speed boost from new Intel quad-core chips to add more brawn to the eye-pleaser. Going from S$1,648 at the Apple store here, these Core i5 and i7-equipped machines will enable users to multi-task better than its slower dual-core predecessors.

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Following in the footsteps of rivals Apple and HP, the Japanese PC maker unveiled on Thursday a lineup of Lifebook laptops refreshed with Intel’s Sandybridge CPU and chipset, along with a new gaming notebook boasting a generous 17.3-inch screen.

But while the souped-up hardware promises to be less power-hungry and run faster at the same time, notebook fans will be disappointed that Fujitsu has kept to the shiny and somewhat unattractive design for its top-end SH761 laptop. …

Here’s a chance to win HTC’s Desire HD phone, as well as a host of goodies from our regular reader giveaways.

We have a “seeding unit” of the popular Android smartphone from the folks from HTC Singapore to give away to readers of Techgoondu. Essentially, this is a NEW unit with a “white-box” packing that does not come with accessories such as memory cards. But everything is brand new and we have not even powered it on.

We’ve got other good stuff as well, like Lady Gaga earphones, a Jabra Bluetooth headset and Coolermaster V6 CPU coolers as well. More details on how to win here.