Gray box maker Dell will start shipping its first ultrabook, the XPS 13, to the U.S. and Canada from next week.

A statement from the company said that the XPS 13 has a 13-inch Gorilla Glass screen and has been branded as an Intel ultrabooks. It ships with Intel's Core processors based on the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture.
It is not cheap. The ultrabook is priced starting at US$999 with a Core i5 processor. The XPS 13 will become available next month.

Dell said that the XPS 13 is packed in an 11-inch frame, which will help save some desk space. It weighs 1.35 kilograms and is 6 mm thick. It can run up to eight hours on a battery charge. The XPS 13 also supports up to 256GB of SSD storage and 4GB of RAM.

It will also has Smart Connect technology, which keeps the laptop connected to the Internet in sleep mode so email and social network feeds can be updated. The price is a bit of a problem. Intel wants ultrabooks to about $699 by the end of the year and this is a lot higher than that. Ultrabooks exceeding $800 are not often looked at by buyers either.