He said that Intel is currently tracking more than 140 Ivy Bridge-based machines in various stages of the design process. Of those, more than 40 will be touch-enabled and a dozen will be convertibles, or notebooks with a screen that flips around so it can be used like a tablet.

On the subject of tablets, Otellini says Intel views them essentially as “incremental machines” that will command an increasingly larger share of the consumer wallet. With Microsoft set to release Windows 8 later this year, Otellini said that Intel “will participate in that market,” but that sales of Intel-based Windows 8 tablets won’t be material in 2012. Those tablets, by the way, will be built around a variant of Intel’s low-power Atom chip codenamed Clover Trail. At least 20 of those tablets are in the works, too.

The new Aspire Timeline Ultra M5 series comes in 14-inch and 15.6-inch versions, and is thinner than earlier models, measuring 0.81-inch thick and weighing just 4.3 pounds. For comparison, the 14-inch Timeline Ultra M3 comes in at 1.1 inches thick and weighs 4.2 pounds.

The M5 also gets upgraded with Intel’s latest Ivy Bridge processors (either Core i3 or Core i5, depending on the configuration) and Nvidia’s next-generation graphics processor, so you can use it to play games and watch movies.

Acer promises up to eight hours of battery life, as well as fast boot-up and connection times. The company says that the M5 can wake from sleep mode in less than two seconds, and from a deep sleep in six seconds. A 20 gigabyte solid-state drive is onboard to help return the Ultrabook to the state that you last left it.

Other notable features include a built-in optical drive, two USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI port so you can connect to a monitor or TV and a 1.3-megapixel HD Webcam.

Pricing for the Acer Aspire Timeline Ultra M5 series will range between $680 and $830. The Ultrabooks will be available from Acer’s online store and at retailers nationwide.

Something else to note: If you purchase an M5 running Windows 7 Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional or Ultimate, Acer is offering an upgrade program to Windows 8 Pro for $15 till Jan. 13, 2013.

After announcing it at CES 2012, Vizio officially debuted its new line of personal computers today, which includes two thin and light notebooks, a 15-inch laptop and a pair of all-in-one PCs. All will be available later this summer, with prices for each system starting at $898.

In a market that’s already crowded with competition from the likes of Apple, HP and Dell, Vizio is hoping that it can lure new customers by offering products that combine high performance and stylish design.

For those looking for something ultraportable, the company’s Thin + Light series can meet those needs. You can choose between a 14-inch or a 15.6-inch HD display; both models sport a slim aluminum unibody design.

Designed for use on the go, Vizio promises up to seven hours of battery life, and the inclusion of a solid-state drive should also help speed up boot times.

The Ultrabooks also have HDMI ports, so you can connect your laptop to a TV to view your content on a bigger screen.

However, for more of a multimediacentric laptop, there is the Vizio Notebook. It offers a 15.6-inch HD display and is slightly thicker than the Thin + Light models, but it also packs in a more powerful graphics processor.

Last but not least, there are the 24-inch and 27-inch all-in-one PCs. Each model has a 1080p HD display and comes with a wireless keyboard and touchpad with multi-touch support.

Surround sound audio is also onboard, as well as dual HDMI ports, so you can connect your cable box, Blu-ray player or gaming console and turn it into a mini entertainment hub.

All of Vizio’s laptops and all-in-one PCs feature Intel’s latest Ivy Bridge processors and ship with the Signature Edition of Windows 7, which means you won’t get any bloatware or unnecessary applications.

The computers will be sold at major retail stores, including Target, Walmart, Costco, Sam’s Club and Amazon.

Today, the company revealed six new laptops: The Inspiron 13z and 14z for students, the Inspiron 15R and 17R for families, and two Inspiron R Special Edition models for lovers of multimedia. All can be configured with Intel’s latest Ivy Bridge processors.

The Inspiron 14z is Dell’s second Ultrabook, measuring just 0.83-inches thick and weighing 4.12 pounds. It features a 14-inch HD display and promises up to seven hours of battery life, with fast boot-up times. Pricing for the 14z starts at $699.99; the laptop comes with a brushed aluminum finish in either silver or red.

Students looking for a little more flair might find the Inspiron 13z, with its interchangeable lids, to be a better fit. Pricing starts at $599.99; it comes with a 13.3-inch HD display and a 500 gigabyte hard drive.

While portability is a key aspect of both the Inspiron 13z and 14z, the Inspiron 15R and 17R are about bringing entertainment to the home. The two laptops feature advanced audio technology to produce the best sound for watching movies or playing games.

If you want to up the ante, the Special Edition Inspiron 15R and 17R models add more graphics power and the option of a 3-D display, as well as an anodized aluminum exterior.

The Inspiron 15R begins at $549.99, and the Inspiron 17R starts at $599.99. Meanwhile, pricing for the the Special Edition 15R and 17R begins at $899.99 and $1,099.99, respectively.

All of the new Inspiron laptops will be available starting June 19.

Acer Aspire S7 13.3

At the Computex 2012 trade show in Taiwan yesterday, Acer got things started by revealing two Ultrabooks, two tablets and two all-in-one desktops — all designed to run on Windows 8.

The company didn’t reveal full specs, pricing or availability dates but did note some highlights of each product.

Starting with the Aspire S7 Ultrabook series, the company is claiming that both the 13.3-inch model and the 11.6-inch model will be the thinnest and smallest, respectively, full-HD touch Ultrabooks on the market.

Both will feature an aluminum unibody design and a keyboard that automatically adjusts its backlight depending on your current lighting conditions.

Acer Iconia W510

The Iconia W510 is a Windows 8 tablet with a 10.1-inch touchscreen and promises up to 18 hours of battery life.

Meanwhile, the Iconia W700 bumps up the screen size to 11.6 inches and adds full-HD support, as well as an adjustable cradle so you can adjust the viewing angle of the tablet.

Last but not least, there is the Acer Aspire U Series AIO all-in-one desktops. The Aspire 7600U boasts a 27-inch touch display with 64-point simultaneous touch support, so more than one person can use it at the same time. The display can also be rotated 90 degrees.

Acer Iconia W700

If you don’t need that much screen, Acer will offer a 23-inch model in the Aspire 5600U with a tilting radius of 30 degrees to 85 degrees. Both systems support full-HD and Dolby Surround Sound technology.

Now, Lenovo, which bought the ThinkPad brand when it acquired IBM’s personal computer business in 2005, is stripping away some of the weight of the ThinkPad, with a new lightweight model that falls into the Ultrabook category.

The China-based PC maker is also introducing new ThinkPad X, T, W and L Series models, including the lightweight X230, and the ThinkPad X230t, a 12-inch convertible tablet that comes with a fully attached keyboard.

First, the X1 Carbon: Lenovo is claiming the featherweight title with this one, calling it the world’s lightest 14-inch professional Ultrabook. It clocks in at three pounds and, as one might expect from the name, is built with carbon fiber. It has an HD display and backlit keyboard, and is running Intel’s Ivy Bridge processors. Business users will appreciate the option to connect to 3G wireless networks via the laptop, provided that they’ve subscribed to a data plan through a carrier, for those times one needs to get work done and Wi-Fi is as unavailable as water in the desert.

While Lenovo says the laptop can be fully charged in 30 minutes, it’s unclear how long the battery charge is expected to last; and a few other details about the product — such as price and the number of built-in ports — are still unknown. The X1 Carbon Ultrabook will hit the market this summer.

Lenovo’s first entrant in the Ultrabook market, the IdeaPad U300s, which AllThingsD’s Walt Mossberg reviewed late last year, costs $1,095 and comes with a 128 gigabyte drive, 4GB of memory and Intel’s i5 processor. And at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Lenovo showed off the $849 ThinkPad T430u Ultrabook, which is 12mm thick and weighs less than four pounds.

And then there are Lenovo’s new ThinkPad X, T, W, and L Series laptops, which also include Intel’s third-generation Core processors, Dolby audio, HD displays and ThinkPad Precision keyboards with optional backlighting. The T430s is the ThinkPad line’s lightest 14-inch (non-Ultrabook) laptop, while the T530 has a 15-inch full-HD display. But the most notable feature of these laptops is probably the addition of 4G/LTE broadband availability through Lenovo’s upcoming contract-free broadband service. The laptops will go on sale in June, and will range in price from $879 to $1,399.

A punched-up X230 ThinkPad will hit the market in June for $1,179, claiming up to 24 hours of battery life in a 12.5-inch form factor and weighing less than three pounds. This laptop also comes with 4G/LTE mobile broadband access.

If you’d rather have your X230 in tablet form, Lenovo has thought of that, too: The ThinkPad X230t has a rotating display that can be folded over to create an instant tablet. It is touchscreen enabled, comes with a stylus pen and also works with a ThinkPad laser mouse. (Lenovo has been playing with this form factor for a long time, actually. For an idea of how it works, check out this YouTube video.)

The convertible tablet (tabtop? laplet?) will start at around $1,479.

For the most part, these new entrants are still geared toward the professional market. But Tom Butler, Lenovo’s global director of product marketing, says the company is looking to appeal to consumers, too, in what Lenovo calls the “PC-plus” era. “From a ThinkPad perspective, we’re looking at the ‘consumerization’ of tech, so we’re addressing not only the IT departments but also the consumer,” he said.

Given the growing BYOD trend in corporations, it seems like a wise move. But whether workers given the option to work on their own laptops would prefer to bring in a consumer-ized Lenovo ThinkPad or a MacBook Air — or another, thinner Mac laptop reported to be on the way — is still to be seen.

The PC maker has introduced new Ultrabooks that challenge the weight and size of its earlier entrants into the market. And it has also unveiled a new line of “Sleekbooks” that undercut the price of Ultrabooks and, in some cases, use chips from Advanced Micro Devices, therefore excluding them from the Ultrabook family.

First, there’s the Envy SpectreXT, a follow-up to the Envy Spectre 14 Ultrabook. The Envy Spectre 14 is more of a premium Ultrabook, due to its glass coating, $1,400 starting price point, preinstalled Adobe and antivirus security software packages, and the fact that it weighs just under a whopping four pounds.

The SpectreXT, in comparison, is 13.3 inches, weighs just 3.07 pounds, is 14.5mm thick, and has an all-metal body. It comes with an Intel Ivy Bridge processor and, like the Spectre 14, claims a long battery life of up to eight hours (although in my review of the Spectre 14, I got about five hours of battery life with programs running, power-savers turned off, and display set to full brightness).

The Envy SpectreXT also comes with Beats Audio, has an Ethernet port in addition to a USB port, and comes with the aforementioned software packages. It will be available in the U.S. on June 8 for $1,000.

HP also introduced new Envy-branded Ultrabooks, available in larger 14-inch and 15.6-inch models, also with Intel’s latest processors. The laptops are, at their thickest, 19.8 millimeters and come with a choice of solid-state or hybrid hard-disk drives.

What’s more interesting is this new category of Sleekbooks. The only notable difference between Ultrabooks and Sleekbooks, aside from price, is their chipsets. The former are thin and lightweight laptops, categorized as such due to an Intel-driven set of technical specifications, as explained here. The HP Sleekbooks are also thin and light, but feature chips from AMD.

The new 14-inch Envy Sleekbook will ship on May 9 for $700; the 15.6-inch model is just $600 — less than half the price of some other Ultrabooks on the market, and significantly less than the starting price of $999 for Apple’s MacBook Air. Both come with the latest AMD processors, with optional discrete Intel graphics built in for heavy multimedia users. Sleekbooks also claim up to eight or nine hours of battery life.

And for business users, the new HP EliteBook Folio 9470m will come to market this fall. This laptop has a 14-inch screen, but is slightly thinner than the Envy Ultrabooks and weighs 3.6 pounds. Another addition to HP’s enterprise offerings is the EliteBook 2170p Notebook, which has an 11.6-inch display, weighs 2.89 pounds and comes with solid-state drive options.

As HP notes, these laptops are “the first show of resolve” for the new HP Printing and Personal Systems group. Back in March, AllThingsD’s Arik Hesseldahl had the exclusive story on the company’s sweeping reorganization, which moved the Imaging and Printing Group under its PC-making Personal Systems Group, with Executive Vice President Todd Bradley in charge of the new unit.

We all know how that turned out. Dell first conquered the PC market, and the ultracompetitive environment it created drove several companies out of the market: IBM sold its PC business to Lenovo; Gateway sold itself to Acer; Hewlett-Packard acquired Compaq. Other lesser players are all but forgotten.

It’s as if Dell was a victim of the hyperefficient world it created. HP is now the world’s biggest PC maker, followed by China’s Lenovo, with Dell in third place on a global basis, as of last quarter.

PCs — consumer and business PCs — still amount to about half of Dell’s business. But there’s another way to look at Dell, and that’s from the point of view of its enterprise business. I learned this in a recent conversation with Steve Felice, Dell’s chief commercial officer. I also learned that the consumer PC business, for which Dell is still widely known in the U.S., amounts to about one-fifth of its business, while its enterprise lines of business, including commercial PCs, amount to 50 percent.

It’s all part of the long-term transformation that has been underway at Dell for a few years now. The company recently did three acquisitions in as many days, the most significant of which was for Wyse Technology.

That caught my attention. But first I wanted Felice’s reaction to the findings of a J.P. Morgan survey of 100 CIOs, saying that the release of Microsoft’s Windows 8 wouldn’t be much of a catalyst for PC buying at large companies.

(We had a pretty good talk, so, arbitrarily, I left in an eighth question from our exchange.)

AllThingsD: Steve, there’s a survey out from J.P. Morgan recently that says that CIOs from large companies don’t see Windows 8 as the sort of thing that would get them buying PCs again. That, to me, could be interpreted as bad news for Dell. Is it?

Felice: I don’t think so. Operating system changes have never been a catalyst, at least not in the corporate world. Consumers and small businesses take off with it right away. Corporations have rollout schedules, and they stick to them. Some of them are just starting to deploy Windows 7. They do their three-year roll-out schedules, and when it’s time they’ll go to Windows 8. About 55 percent of our business are the larger mid-sized and up public companies. The other 45 percent are small businesses and consumer. We’ll see some buying within that 45 percent. On the others, they will go on their normal schedule.

On the enterprise side, I was just with a bunch of CIOs here, and there are some very common themes about why I think they are going to spend some money. And it’s really to continue a transformation of their own infrastructure, to take advantage of virtualization and cloud computing and bigger pipes to transport information. There is a pretty common theme that there is more opportunity to get more out of assets. There is more optimism around moving away from legacy architectures and into open systems. The whole concept of being more “open to open” is there. We view that as good, because we’re the pure play when it comes to moving to open architectures.

What are the CIOs you talk to worried about these days?

Security. It’s easily in the top three concerns. We think we added to our portfolio two of the best assets out there. One is intended to tell you how to figure out what’s going on in their world. That’s what SecureWorks, a company we acquired recently, does. It analyzes your infrastructure and tells you where your threats are coming from and how to prevent them. And then we just announced the acquisition of SonicWall. They built a nice unified threat-management platform. From my viewpoint, it helps enable the movement to open. Some people are afraid to leave the proprietary world because they think it’s more secure.

Where are you on mobile? I read that you just killed a smartphone model. Where is Dell going on the mobile front?

I would characterize the last couple of years as us experimenting with what form factors and operating environments will work. The good thing is that we’ve never overextended ourselves in mobile, yet we’ve launched a lot of products, and we’ve learned a lot from them. We’ve launched tablets — 5-inch, 7-inch, 10-inch. We’ve launched them in emerging markets first, we’ve launched them in developed markets first. We’ve launched smartphones around the world. So we have an active smartphone that we just launched in China, and one in Japan. We just end-of-lifed one in the U.S., which is what I think you’re referring to. We have a road map of other products that are coming up. We are predominantly a commercial-oriented business that has some consumer business, but the lines are blurring.

What we’ve learned is to look at the consumer from the commercial side, not the other way around. Some companies who have done well in mobility are all about consumers and entertainment. And looking at the consumer as an individual, without any regard to how they might interact on the professional side of their life. Executives of any company I talk to say these devices are driving them crazy. They don’t know what’s happening to their information, how they get it back, nor how to interact with the other devices that people are bringing into the workplace. Or how to support them and control them. No one is dealing with that. So, generally, you’re going to see Dell think more broadly about the mobile ecosystem. When you next see devices from Dell, you’ll see us thinking more about the security of them, the end-to-end aspects of managing them, from the data center to the end user.

And yet what I’m hearing from a lot of companies is that they’re just adopting iPads, mainly because the bosses have them and love them. This is how Apple is penetrating the enterprise. How is Dell going to compete with that?

It’s unique, no question. And so it’s got some infatuation aspects to it. But then I talk to these customers, and because there isn’t a lot of alternatives, what they’re tolerating is pretty interesting. They say they have one of those products. Then the problems start coming out. First, the office applications don’t work very well, and they have trouble reading PowerPoint decks. And then they can’t wirelessly print easily, and some days they’re not able to get on the network at the office. And I look at that and say, they’re tolerating a lot because they like the form factor. Our conclusion is that there need to be some alternatives.

We’ve got the Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook, and we take it around and show it to customers, and invariably the decision-maker wants one. And then he says that if he had this, he never would have bothered with the tablet. So we took a consumer-oriented product and put pro support on it, and showed that to CIOs and said that if their executive team used it, they’d get the same support as they would on their Latitude product. So when it breaks, someone will come to the office and fix it, and you don’t have to go stand in line at the Apple store. Then we put image management on it. If you want a corporate image that has to be managed, we’ll do that. Institutions want thin and light devices, but they also want the options to secure and support them. The other thing that is happening, with ARM, you’ll get even more form factors.

Well, let’s talk about the PC, then. People keep talking about the decline of the PC. The research houses keep predicting market declines, and sometimes they materialize and sometimes they don’t. But even so, the numbers — at least globally — are flat to slightly up. Yet when you drill down to different regions, you see very different stories, with different countries growing like crazy. How does Dell see this right now?

This is a weighted math problem. The lowest growth rates are in the developed world, which will remain more of a replacement cycle world. The U.S. is like that because PC penetration is very high. Then you go to India and China, where it’s very low. What’s happening is that the emerging markets, where combined, they will be bigger than the developed world. And they are still growing rapidly, so the math is going to reverse itself. You’ll still see low-single-digit growth rates in the developed world, but healthy growth rates in emerging markets — but the emerging markets will be bigger. We still see double-digit growth in China. Look at Indonesia, there’s 300 million people just starting to buy PCs. As these countries industrialize and get more mature, they just need basic computing.

And how do those markets develop?

It comes back to the first thing I talked about. These countries don’t have the legacy baggage. They’ll grow, they’ll industrialize, they’ll need more infrastructure. And what will they buy? They’ll buy standard servers, storage, and open systems. This is happening in China, and its why we’re No. 1 in servers there.

Do you think people still associate Dell with the PC and don’t give it enough credit for its greater focus on the enterprise?

I’d have to say yes. Some of that is our own doing. We have this very large direct model, and we have a tendency to talk to customers one on one. So we tend not to do a lot of brand advertising. So our consumer advertising is more visible. If you ask people randomly what portion of our business is consumer, they’d say it’s more than half, but in fact it’s only about 20 percent. And if you ask people what portion of our business is servers and storage, they don’t know, but it’s more than 50 percent.

If you combine consumer and commercial PCs, how much is that?

About half is PC, and that’s global. But I think with all the acquisitions we’ve done, and a lot more customer testimonials we’re doing, the perception is changing. We’ve done some targeted testing of campaigns where we say, ‘Do you know that Dell does this?’ The perception of Dell as an enterprise provider skyrocketed. Brazil is an interesting case, because we entered the server and storage market there before the PC market. That’s because the only way to really be successful in Brazil with PCs is to have your own manufacturing there, because of the stiff tariffs. So in Brazil, Dell is thought of as an enterprise company. You’ll see more of a commitment this year to do more brand-oriented advertising around the enterprise.