Rumors that all new Intel Ultrabooks will be equipped with a software called Devicescape that lets you connect to over 8 million wifi hotspots over the world. While this technology isn’t new (boingo, skype wifi etc), this variant will work even while in standby. For example if your laptop is in sleep mode in your backpack while you walk by an open hotspot, it is able to do some quick updates and things like that.  That way you’d be online and up to date (think stock quotes, Twitter, email, etc.) as soon as you actually turn the machine on. There’s no word of course on whether this will affect the price of the machines, or even if it’ll affect battery life. Windows 8 does have Connected Standby, so if that works correctly when the time comes, this whole setup might happen at a minimal impact on battery.

 

Devicescape refers to itself as a “curated virtual network” (CVN) — out of the approximately 100 million open Wi-FI connections in the world, about eight million are part of the Devicescape network. The company measures all potential candidates by quality, availability, speed, and reliability, and only adds fewer ten percent of the networks it measures into its CVN.