ASUS’ endearingly slim Designo MS series LCD displays are headed to the UK, the company have confirmed, with prices for the 16.5mm thick monitors around the £244 mark ($400). According to Electricpig, that will probably get you the 23.6-inch model, the MS246, which offers 1080p HD resolution.
ASUS have outed two new Republic of Gamers notebooks, the G60 and G71X, offering Intel Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad processors respectively. The two new laptops each have NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 260M with 1GB of dedicated memory, driving a 16-inch 1,366 x 768 display in the case of the G60, and a 1,920 x 1,200 in the G71X. Both machines have Blu-ray drives, dual HDDs set up in RAID arrays (640GB total in the G60; 1TB total in the G71X) and both HDMI and eSATA ports.
The latest DigiTimes rumors are in, and this time they don’t seem all that unlikely. According to industry sources in Taiwan, Acer’s F1 and HTC’s Leo – both using the Qualcomm Snapdragon 1GHz chipset – will each drop in Q4 this year, complete with Windows Mobile 6.5. They also finger ASUS and Inventec as developing Snapdragon-based smartphones, though those are unlikely to hit full-scale production until the first half of 2010.
ASUS‘ second netbook from this weekend offers a blast from the past, in the shape of a Linux OS option. The ASUS Eee PC 1001HA is billed as an entry-level model, but will be available in three different versions: the 1001HA XP, with Windows XP, the 1001HA LX, with Linux, or a bare model that comes with no OS at all.
ASUS have kicked out a new 12-inch netbook, the Eee PC 1201N, packing NVIDIA’s Ion graphics chipset and 2GB of RAM. The Eee PC 1201N is yet to make an official appearance on ASUS’ own site, but is currently listed with a Chinese web retailer; for your 3,504 yuan ($513) you get Intel’s Atom N270 1.6GHz processor and a 250GB 5,400rpm SATA hard-drive.
ASUS have rolled out a new version of their standalone Skype videophone, in the shape of the AiGuru SV1T. The most significant change from the first-gen AiGuru SV1 is that the 7-inch 800 x 480 display now gets a touchscreen layer, meaning users no longer have to arduously navigate via the D-pad.
Asus announced the new UL notebook series a few weeks back and I mentioned the new line at that point. Asus has now got official with a specific UL model called the UL80. The machine is a 14-inch notebook with a 3 pound chassis.
ASUS have revealed a few more details about their upcoming ebook reader, the tentatively-named Eee Reader. Potentially landing in late 2009 “at the earliest”, the Eee Reader will – say industry sources, in usual DigiTimes style – come in two versions with either a 6- or 9-inch monochrome touchscreen.
Back at CES in January, I was roaming around the Asus booth and one of the PR schleps pulled me into a room in the back to show me the Eee keyboard. My first thoughts were yeah its cool, but what’s the point of the thing really. Asus has finally confirmed when the Eee Keyboard will ship and it now has one bit of tech crammed inside that may just make it useful after all.
Details and fuzzy live shots of ASUS’ upcoming Home Server have leaked, and while there’s no official word from the company themselves this looks like the kind of compact storage we would happily find space for on our bookshelves. The 9.6 x 3.8 x 8 inch ASUS Home Server TS mini packs twin 3.5-inch hard-drives together with a fulsome six USB 2.0 ports and two eSATA ports.
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