A Review of Ultrabooks - Sleek, Sexy and Oh So PC - NYTimes.com From left, the Dell XPS 13, Lenovo IdeaPad U300s, HP Envy 14 Spectre and Toshiba Portégé Z835-P370 ultrabooks. It's an absolutely gorgeous, sleek wedge of a laptop, clad in shining brushed metal. There's no DVD drive. The battery is sealed and nonremovable. The keys protrude through individual square holes in the laptop's deck. The multitouch trackpad is buttonless - you get different clicks by pressing different spots. You generally need a separate adapter dongle if you want to connect to Ethernet or a VGA projector. And there's no hard drive. Instead, you get a solid-state drive (SSD), which is sort of like a giant memory card. It helps with battery life and fast start-up times. Those expensive SSDs make ultrabooks ultra-expensive ($900 and up), and you get very little storage, usually 128 gigabytes. In a laptop with a regular hard drive, you can get eight times that much storage - for a lot less money. So what is an ultrabook? It's MacBook Air that runs Windows. That's just about everybody's description - except Intel, which developed the concept. ("Was the MacBook Air an inspiration for this category?" I asked Intel's P.R. team. "No," was the answer. The Ultrabook category was conceptualized out of multiple rounds of research going back several years. Well, chalk up one for mind-blowing coincidence.) Because of the tiny storage, an ultrabook doesn't make a good primary computer, and can store only wee photo, music and video collections. Forget high-horsepower games, too. And to install software, you'll have to buy an external DVD drive or stick to downloadable software. But never mind all that. If you have the money, you'll love how satisfying, beautiful and exquisitely designed these machines made by the major PC makers are. For most uses - e-mail, Web surfing, chat, Microsoft Office, music, streaming movies - an ultrabook is pure joy. If, that is, you can stop running your hands over the cool, polished metal. A MacBook Air still has the best combination of design, screen, keyboard, trackpad and battery life. But ultrabooks come close, and they offer the advantages of choice. For example, ultrabooks come in larger screen sizes, like 14 inches (Hewlett-Packard) and 15 (Samsung). You can buy an ultrabook with a nonglossy screen - the colors aren't as vibrant, but you don't get annoying reflections. Most ultrabooks have dedicated keys that Apple leaves out, like Home, End, Page Up and Page Down. Finally, most ultrabooks cost less than an Air, which is $1,300 for the 13-inch model. I tested ultrabooks from Acer, Asus, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Samsung and Toshiba. Most have identical guts: 4GB memory, 128GB SSD, Intel Core i5 processor, 13-inch glossy screen (1366 x 768 pixels), an SD slot for your camera's memory card, two or three USB jacks (including a USB 3.0 for faster charging of gadgets), a miniature HDMI jack for connecting to a TV, Web camera, mike/headphone jacks and illuminated keys. Most weigh just under three pounds and get about six hours on a charge. In most cases, you can pay more for a bigger SSD (256 gigabytes) and faster Intel i7 processor. Despite those similarities, they have personalities all their own. You read that price right: this is the least expensive ultrabook so far. To reach that price, Acer kind of cheated. The SSD is small (20GB) and holds only start-up files; all your files go onto a traditional 320GB hard drive. Result: lower price, more storage, slower laptop. More compromises: The keys feel like you're typing on concrete. The cursor keys are the size of Tic Tacs. Also, only the top is metal (a gorgeous muted silver). The keyboard, deck, palm rest and bottom are all plastic. The battery life isn't great - about five hours. Gorgeous dark gray metal lid, Bang & Olufsen circuitry for slightly richer sound. But the keyboard doesn't light up, and the keys don't travel much. You press the left and right lower corners of the trackpad to produce right- and left-clicks, but mine often produced the wrong kind of click. The screen has higher resolution than most (1600 x 900), meaning that you can see more without scrolling (at smaller size). An 11-inch model is also available.