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Sony Vaio

The Sony Vaio Flip and Vaio Tap 11
After some hands-on time with these laptops that become tablets and this tablet that becomes a Surface-style laptop, we came to the conclusion that Sony had really learned from the mistakes it made in its first convertible laptop. The Flip's touchscreen, um, flips to cover the keyboard in a way similar to but distinct from Dell's excellent XPS 12. The Tap 11 also uses ultra-low-voltage Y-series Haswell CPUs to bring Ultrabook-level performance to something not much bigger than the Retina iPad or Nexus 10.

The build quality on both systems is good, and while the key travel in both the Flip laptops and the Tap 11's keyboard cover could be better, it certainly isn't the worst we've encountered. The Flip lineup is also fairly diverse—you can choose from 13-, 14-, and 15-inch screen sizes, and the 14- and 15-inch models include dedicated GPUs. 1080p displays are standard in all three Flip laptops and the Tap 11 tablet, but the 15-inch Flip also comes with a 2560×1620 display option. SSDs are standard in the 13-inch Flip and Tap 11 and are optional in the 14- and 15-inch Flips.

Neither pricing nor availability has been announced for the Flip or the Tap systems just yet, though we expect that we'll hear more in the fall.

Asus ZenBook

The Asus ZenBook UX301

We won't lie—we liked the name better at Computex when it was called the ZenBook Infinity. Whatever it's called, it still looks like a promising follow-up to last year's already-good ZenBook Prime. The UX301 takes the attractive all-metal design of the Prime and coats the lid in a layer of Gorilla Glass 3. A 13.3-inch 2560×1440 touchscreen is also available as an option, though the base model comes with a 1920×1080 touchscreen identical in resolution and density to last year's model.

The internals also get the Haswell bump. AnandTech reports that the base CPUs on offer are a 1.6GHz Core i5-4200U or 1.8GHz Core i7-4500U, the same as we've seen in Ultrabooks like Acer's new Aspire S7. The more interesting option is the Core i7-4558U, which requires more power (28W TDP vs. 15W TDP in the 4200U and 4500U) but provides a substantial boost to CPU and GPU performance.

The i7-4558U is clocked at 2.8GHz, while the integrated HD 4400 GPU of the base models is replaced by Intel's Iris 5100, the second-fastest integrated GPU in the Haswell lineup. The HD 4400 isn't much of an upgrade over last year's HD 4000, but an increased number of Intel's "execution units" plus a larger power envelope should make the Iris 5100 a nice step up (faster even than the HD 5000 in the 2013 MacBook Air).

The rest of the laptop is sufficiently high-end: you've got 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, USB 3.0, either 4GB or 8GB of RAM, up to 512GB SSDs, and both a mini-DisplayPort and mini-HDMI port. All of this is in a laptop that's 0.61 inches thick and weighs 3.04 pounds, which makes it neither the thinnest nor lightest laptop with a 13.3-inch screen but still plenty competitive. If Asus can bring the great build quality and keyboard from the ZenBook Prime into this upgraded model, it may just end up being the Ultrabook to beat (though the price and release date will be important, and we don't know either yet).

Asus also announced the UX302, a lower-end relative to this laptop. It includes a dedicated graphics option, but you can't get the 2560×1440 screen, you get a hybrid hard drive instead of a pure SSD, you can only buy it with 4GB of RAM, and at 0.68 inches thick and 3.3 pounds it outweighs the UX301 by a bit.