Give Dell credit for wading into open source waters with "Project Sputnik," a pilot program to build a developer solution based on Ubuntu 12.04LTS. After six months of exploration and feedback from testers, Project Sputnik has now landed and is renamed Dell XPS 13 Laptop, Developer Edition. It's a thin and light 13.3-inch Ultrabook powered by Intel's Core i7 3517U processor and driven by Ubuntu, though you could potentially end up paying more versus a similarly spec'd Windows 7 model (with slower processor) or Windows 8 model (with half the storage space). Let's look at the hardware.

Have you ever thought of your friends and family as sharing traits with an Ultrabook? Neither have we, but Acer hopes you'll be willing to entertain the idea for a chance to win a thin and light Aspire S7 Ultrabook with Windows 8. It's part of a Facebook contest (one that we're in no way affiliated with, but figured we'd give you a heads up) in which you can enter to win a new laptop daily through December 31, 2012.

Lenovo has quietly posted a new webpage teasing visitors with a product shot of its upcoming ThinkPad X1 Carbon Touch Ultrabook. Optimized for Windows 8, the touch-friendly Ultrabook will be available to purchase next month, though Lenovo didn't offer up an exact release date or any pricing information. There isn't much of a spec sheet to go on either, though we suspect it will sport the same or similar guts as the non-touch version.

Hey look, it's another affordable Chromebook! This one is from Acer, which this week debuted its new C7 Chromebook priced at $199. That's $50 less expensive than Samsung's recently introduced Chromebook for 2012. Both models sport an 11.6-inch display and the latest version of Google's Chrome OS, and though there are a few subtle differences between the two, you could argue that both are compelling options in a space that was once dominated by netbooks.