This is HP Spectre, the world’s thinnest laptop that is set to take on Apple’s MacBook. Here are details on its price, specs and release date.

Wireless charging has constantly been spoken of in the past as a technology the consumer market will eventually adopt with natural progression, and according to a report over at DigiTimes, Intel could be launching a new system that’ll allow wireless charging of smartphones powered by its processors. The technology has been approved by the Wireless Power Consortium as the Qi standard, and is another leap in the quest of hardware manufacturers to minimize the cables and wires – something we definitely agree with.

Much like the manner in which the iPhone arrived and changed the face of the smartphone market, the developments of Apple’s MacBook range has left notebook manufacturers chasing shadows. In answer to the MacBook Air (and as of Monday, the next-gen MacBook Pro), Windows OEMs have basically attempted to copy the thin, light and powerful trident by creating ultrabooks.

Taking time out from readying the eagerly-awaited Ivy Bridge chips for the latest spate of MacBooks, Intel showed off its new inductive charging solution at the Computex event. Smarphones gobble up an unholy amount of battery, and those low juice warnings are a constant bane of the lives of most mobile device users. Finding a charging cable is often a scramble, and the whole process in general is just inconvenient. It would be nice if all you had to do was plonk your device next to your notebook for the charging process to commence in an unattended fashion, wouldn’t it?

It is growing to be an increasingly difficult task to keep up with who owns what patents, and with companies applying for, and being granted more and more, the task looks set to be come even more tasking. We have seen news coming out of California in the last few days that Apple have just been awarded an additional nineteen patents related to various products and technologies, one of which relates to the design of their ultra thin MacBook Air range.

This year’s CES has shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that 2012 is going to be the year that the computer market at large is going to catch up with Apple. At least, it will in the world of ultra-light, ultra-portable notebooks like the MacBook Air.

Remember netbooks? Those cheap, or at least cheap-ish little computers that were supposed to be the death of all ‘real’ notebooks just a few short years ago? What happened to them?

Ultrabooks are something of a new breed, with Apple’s MacBook Air their forefather. While we have had netbooks for a few years now, they’ve historically been underpowered, cheap and not always cheerful machines that were only there to fill a purpose until the tablets came along.