As intel promised back at Computex in Taipei, ultrabooks are on their way: and they look good!

MacBook Air competitors are starting to appear and a couple of them we’ve seen today are looking like they could give the super-thin Apple MacBook a stiff competition.

The Toshiba Portege Z830  Series, is a 13.3-inch that only measures 0.63-inches in thickness and Toshiba claims this to be the “World’s lightest 13-inch platform” at 2.45 pounds.

They may have a point here because the MacBook Air weighs 2.96 pounds, the VAIO Z is 2.57 pounds, and the Acer at the bottom is 3.08 pounds.

Under the hood Toshiba has been able to pack the usual Sandy Bridge Core i3, i5 or i7 processors, and a range of different size SSD storage units.
Battery should be an 8-cell that should last over 8 hours.

Additionally the machine has got Ethernet, HDMI, and VGA ports, an SD card reader, a 3.5mm headphone jack, as well as two USB 2.0 jacks and a single USB 3.0 socket. On top of that, it has a backlit keyboard.

The entry level model should be under $1000, not bad eh?!

The Taiwan-based Acer also presented its first ultrabook.

The Aspire S3 is a 13.3-inch is quite a bit thinner than the Toshiba at 0.51-inches.

“The Aspire S3 is truly designed to meet notebook users’ needs, combining essential features of the smartphone and tablet PC, such as fast startup and Internet connectivity, with long battery life,” said Acer’s president Mr Kan.

The company hasn’t released its specs but we can imagine being similar to the Toshiba. The Aspire though will be available in both HDD and SSD versions and the entry level price is around $1100.

Acer expects the ultrabook will make up 25 percent to 30 percent of the company’s notebook shipments in 2012