SAN FRANCISCO--Trying to catch up and even surpass Apple’s Siri and Google’s Wallet, Intel Corp. showed efforts with Nuance and Mastercard--and offered a $1 million prize--for creating novel user interfaces for its ultrabooks. The initiatives were announced at the Intel Developer Forum where much of the initial day focused on the ultrathin notebooks that have yet to gain big market success.
Intel announced just last week that sales for its current quarter would be
about $1 billion below expectations, triggering one analyst here to ask if its ultrabooks will be the hero product Intel hoped.
"We are not taking our foot of the gas--we are pushing harder and innovating more around the [ultrabook] category," said Dadi Perlmutter, general manager of the Intel Architecture Group, in a Q&A following a keynote address.
Intel showed new processors, novel user interfaces and new form factors to help drive ultrabooks forward. The ultrabook “will be a hero product with refreshed form factors,” Permutter said.
In his keynote, Perlmutter showed ultrabooks from AsusTek, Compal and Sony that could flip, slide or detach their displays to become tablets.
An Intel employee demos a Sony ultrabook that slides into a tablet.