You might also remember that a couple of those laptops managed to stand out from the crowd — including Hewlett-Packard’s Envy Spectre 14, which goes on sale today.

Showgoers were abuzz about the glossy, Gorilla Glass-coated Spectre — despite the fact that at almost four pounds, it weighs slightly more than some other ultra-thin, Intel-driven Ultrabooks. At $1,399, it’s 20mm thin with a 14-inch screen, supports up to 256 gigabytes of storage and boasts up to nine and half hours of battery life. It also has a backlit keyboard and “proximity sensors” that light up when a user is approaching the laptop and, naturally, it has HP’s Beats Audio built in.

Another notable feature is that it incorporates near field communication technology, like the kind we’ve been seeing in mobile phones for quick, one-tap payments. HP says that the NFC tech in the Spectre, which is built into the left side of the palm-rest area, will be compatible with NFC-enabled Android phones.

So, how will it work, exactly?

After downloading the HP Touch to Share app from the Android Market, Spectre owners that have an NFC-enabled Android phone will be able to transfer URLs from the Android phone to the Spectre using NFC. For example, if you’re browsing the Web on your phone, you can then tap your screen and transfer that page to the laptop’s Web browser.

You can’t currently share photos, music or other media this way, an HP spokesperson confirmed. And while NFC is often associated with e-commerce, that’s not the usage we’re talking about here. (Since the laptop isn’t a payment terminal, you can’t, for example, browse Amazon.com, see something you’d like to buy, open up a wallet app on your phone and tap the screen with your phone to pay.) But it is a way for smartphones to “speak to” the laptop without using wires or cloud apps.

The NFC market for mobile is expected to grow dramatically over the next few years, with IHS iSuppli forecasting 544.7 million NFC-equipped cellphones to be shipped by 2015 (from 93.2 million last year); it’s likely that we’ll see this tech coming to more devices outside of mobile phones and tablets.

Nintendo, for one, recently said it plans to bring NFC to its long-awaited Wii successor, where it will be used to transfer gaming data.

So HP and Lenovo have added some features to their Ultrabooks to set them apart from all the ultra-noise.

Lenovo's IdeaPad Yoga

The Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga is named as such because of its flexibility. The 10-finger touchscreen has a full range of motion at the hinge, so when fully folded, the laptop turns into a 13.3.-inch tablet. And it can be propped up in tent mode — or, in this case, downward dog. I could see this being useful for entertainment viewing at home, as well as in small spaces, such as on an airplane.

Other laptops have shown this range of motion before — remember the Dell Inspiron Duo? — but adding this feature to a super-slim, touchscreen Windows 8 laptop is a nice touch.

The Yoga’s cover is solid aluminium; it measures 16.9mm thick and weighs 3.1 pounds. It is, of course, powered by an Intel Core processor, with 8 gigabytes of RAM and a 256GB solid-state drive. Lenovo claims the battery lasts up to eight hours.

Since the IdeaPad Yoga runs the upcoming Windows 8 operating system, the laptop likely won’t be available until the second half of the year. A representative for Lenovo said the company hopes to price it around $1,300.

Gorilla Glass is what makes the HP Envy Spectre 14 stand out. The ultra-thin, chemically strengthened material is what coats the exterior and the wrist rest of this laptop, giving it a sleek, reflective look — albeit one that needs to be wiped with a cloth pretty frequently.

HP's Envy Spectre 14

Yesterday at CES, someone lamented to me, regarding the Envy Spectre 14, “But it’s so heavy.” Weighing in at almost four pounds, the Spectre is a bit heavier than other Ultrabooks, but for comparison’s sake, the 13-inch version of the “regular” HP Envy notebook is just about the same, at 3.68 pounds.

The Spectre is 20mm thin, has a 14-inch screen and Intel Core processors, and supports up to 256GB of storage. It also boasts nine hours of battery life, versus Lenovo’s eight. The Spectre also has a backlit keyboard and proximity sensors which detect when a user is approaching the laptop and light up the keys in advance. And it has HP’s Beats Audio built in.

Another interesting feature of the Spectre is that it’s NFC-enabled; theoretically, users can share data from an NFC smartphone by tapping the phone against the Spectre.

The HP Envy Spectre is expected to launch in early February, and will cost around $1,399.

Neither of these Ultrabooks have DVD slots, but the HP Envy Spectre 14 has an expandable Ethernet port, USB 3.0, HDMI and Mini DisplayPort, while the IdeaPad Yoga has USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports, an HDMI port and an SD card slot.

A fun side note about the HP Envy Spectre 14: A company representative says HP actually first displayed a prototype of this Ultrabook last fall, during New York Fashion Week. But it was a “bejeweled” version, with Swarovski crystal designs by Marchesa, and fashion-focused reporters barely batted an eye at the thing. Who knew they were missing one of this season’s biggest CES trends?

(Images courtesy of Blogeee/Flickr)

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Aside from the fact that this magic glass is being labeled Gorilla Glass 2, we don’t have many other details at this point. But in this MSNBC.com video from last year, Corning says the next big thing in glass will be a Gorilla Glass that can be formed into 3-D shapes so it can be used in products like keyboards and kitchen countertops. (The company also said at the start of 2011 that Gorilla Glass would be a $1 billion business; it later had to scale back that estimate.)

Corning says its Gorilla Glass is currently used in more than 575 product models across 30 major brands, totaling more than 500 million units worldwide.

Devices with Gorilla Glass displays include Motorola’s Xoom tablet, Nokia’s newer smartphones and Android smartphones (with the exception of the Galaxy Nexus).

While it’s unclear whether Apple’s latest iPhone and iPad displays are made using Corning’s Gorilla Glass, Walter Isaacson’s recently published biography of Steve Jobs includes an anecdote about how Jobs used his “reality distortion field” to get Corning to bring its specialty glass to market in time for the first iPhone launch.

Meanwhile, an IHS iSuppli teardown of the iPad 2 last year suggested that the device’s screen is made of Dragontrail Glass, manufactured by Japan’s Asahi Glass.