Vizio made some waves with its first Ultrabooks, delivering sharper screens than the competition along with sleek designs and a bloatware-free Windows experience. Ultimately, though, short battery life dampened our enthusiasm for the Thin +Light CT15-A1. Now Vizio is back with the 14” and 15” Thin + Light Touch, which cram double the battery capacity into bodies that are just as slim, plus a touch screen for poking Windows 8 Live Tiles.
Announced at CES 2013 and hitting store shelves this spring, the 14” Thin + Light Touch has a 2.3-GHz quad-core AMD A10 processor, 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD. (Vizio will keep a more premium Intel Core i7 model in the lineup.) You get all of this in a fairly light 4.1-pound chassis that measures 0.7 inches thick.
Otherwise, the 14” Thin + Light Touch has everything we like about its predecessor, including a sharp and colorful 1600 x 900-pixel display and SRS-powered stereo speakers. Vizio says it's customers haven't complained much, but we still lament the lack of an SD Card slot.
More: CES 2013 Complete Coverage
The 15” Thin + Light Touch will also come in Intel and AMD flavors, but only the latter will offer discrete graphics. That means you should be able to play popular games on the full HD (1920 x 1080) screen.
Although both new Vizio notebooks look identical to the original models, the company promises some other improvements. Vizio completely swapped out the touchpad and software for a better navigation and gesture experience, and the keyboard has been tweaked for comfier typing.
Vizio will announce pricing at a later date, but we expect the 14” and 15” Thin + Light Touch to be very competitive versus comparably equipped Ultrabooks. We'll bring you our hands-on impressions shortly.
