The new devices could appear later this year, with hybrid disk drives helping keep costs low, according to a report.

Lower-end ultrabooks equipped with hybrid disk drives could hit price points as low as $600, according to an Asia-based report.

Because hybrid HDDs--which combine a small-capacity solid-state drive with a standard hard disk drive--cost about 50 percent less than solid-state-only drives, PC makers will opt for hybrid drives in lower-end models, according to a report Wednesday in DigiTimes. This will drive prices below $700.

Ultrabooks--skinny
Windows 7 laptops that mimic the portability of
tablets--currently bottom out at about $800. That includes the Toshiba Portege Z835, now priced as low as $799.99 at retail. The Z835 uses a 128GB SSD, not a hybrid drive.

Future ultrabooks equipped with hybrid HDDs will fall to between $600 and $700 in the fourth quarter of 2012, according to DigiTimes, citing sources.

Those same sources claim that Intel will cut prices on its next-generation Ivy Bridge chip by up to 70 percent.

Intel doesn't see it that way, however. While the chipmaker does not discuss pricing of its products prior to launch, the DigiTimes report of a $60 to $70 price reduction on Ivy Bridge processors "is simply not true," a source at Intel told CNET on Tuesday.

Ivy Bridge is due in the spring and is expected to be the ultrabook processor of choice for Windows 8-based systems.

New smartphones continue to appear in advance of Mobile World Congress. Samsung is the player this time with the Galaxy Ace 2 and Galaxy Mini 2.

At this point, there may not be any new phones left to unveil at Mobile World Congress.

This time Samsung is getting a head start on next week's wireless trade show by announcing the Galaxy Mini 2 and Galaxy Ace 2. Though we heard rumors of the Mini 2 last week, Samsung waited until early Tuesday morning to make the handsets official in a press release from the company's Korean headquarters.

As if the "2" in their names wasn't a dead giveaway, both phones are sequels to the Galaxy Ace and Galaxy Mini that we saw last year at Mobile World Congress (the recent Galaxy S Plus is another member of the family). That means of course, that both devices offer entry-level features and simple compact designs.

The Galaxy Ace 2 has a 3.8-inch WVGA display, an 800MHz processor,
Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), a 5-megapixel camera, a second VGA shooter around front, a digital music player, a microSD card slot, 4GB of internal memory, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, USB 2.0, GPS, and Samsung's TouchWiz interface. For connectivity, it supports all four GSM bands plus HSDPA for data.

The Galaxy Mini 2 also has an 800MHz processor and Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), but its features are scaled down just a bit. There's a 3.27-inch HVGA display, a 3-megapixel camera, a digital music player, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, USB 2.0, a microSD card slot, and 4GB of internal memory. It has TouchWiz, as well, and it's a quadband world phone with HSDPA support.

The Ace 2 will be available in the United Kingdom starting in April while the Mini 2 will hit France next month with a global release to follow. Samsung did not reveal pricing at the time of this writing.

We've no doubt that Samsung will show off the phones when Mobile World Congress begins next Monday in Barcelona, Spain. CNET will be there to bring you details on Sammy's other announcements plus hands-on impressions.

Are we peering inside the
iPad 3, while seeing design tweaks to the outside too?

A couple of reports today claim to expose more pieces of the iPad 3's design puzzle.

The first is a purported photo of the next-generation iPad's circuit board. If legitimate, the chip inside the next iPad--let's call it the iPad 3--is dubbed the "A5X" not the A6 as has been rumored.

So, who cares what the chip is called you might ask? Well, barring a Photoshopped rendering of the board, this could lend credence to the speculation in some quarters that the iPad 3 won't be quad-core but a souped-up dual-core chip.

And that then leads to some more interesting speculation. Is Apple focusing more on the graphics side of the chip equation to drive all of those pixels on the iPad 3's eye-popping 2,048-by-1,536-pixel display? In other words, is Apple devoting more chip real estate to the graphics engine or other specialized cores rather than a symmetric quad-core chip design?

The next item in the rumor hopper is the iPad 3's case. An ostensible photo of the case shows a design not that different than the iPad 2's but with some small tweaks around the edges--possibly a more "beveled" look.

Maybe more interesting are the claims about a larger rear camera lens.

In addition to the rumored changes cited above, other expected iPad 3 specs include 4G LTE connectivity and a launch date of March 7.

(Via Macrumors and AppleInsider)