Asus Zenbooks – that’s the name for the Asus ultrabooks?

YRRJ4CSPYSE4 It’s October, so Asus has to deliver on their promise to unveil an ultrabook. Better said, to confirm a launch date, price and territory availability, considering they introduced their ultra slim laptops, namely UX 21 and UX 31, back in June.

Just to make sure we’re on the same page here- ultrabooks are laptops with a thickness of maximum 0.8 inches, pack SSD drives, weigh under 3 pounds and cost under 1000 bucks. And, of course, they run on Intel hardware, because Intel came up with the concept in the first place.

Liliputing.com comes with the info that Asus might re-brand their ultrabooks as zenbooks to solve a couple of problems, during an exclusive event that will go down soon enough in Italy and the US. First, it’s pricing.

While Intel and eager manufacturers said that the ultrabook should and would cost under a grand, components manufacturers played that down, saying it’s difficult to stay within that price range because of SSDs and other expensive components, which will be cheaper only next year.

So Acer might call these ultrabooks whatever they want and charge more than 1000 for them, claiming that these are not ultrabooks, but some other ultra slim laptops looking and feeling exactly like one of those. Second, it’s marketing, as Asus will want to separate their line from the one almost certainly coming from HP and the hoards that will surely follow, and give their line a unique feel.

The Asus UX 21 will finally get a price tag on October 11

Either way, Asus will have to deliver an ultrabook on October 11th, meaning that the UX 21 and UX 31 will finally hit the market. The UX 21 has an 11.6 inch display with a 1366 x 768 resolution, a Core i5 or Core i7 processor, an SSD drive, weighs 2.4 pounds and it’s 0.67 inches thin, while the UX 31 has a 13.3 inch panel with a 1600 x 900 resolution, a Core i7 CPU, SSD drive and weighs 2.9 pounds.

Ultrabooks are anticipated to take over the portable computer market by 2013, as Intel has in mind a new platform especially developed for this class, one that requires less power to run and it’s fanless, all resulting in one slim and light machine.

The OS of choice will be Windows 7 for now and Windows 8 shortly after, and we should expect some “tablet like features”, which means the laptop will wake from sleep mode really fast and the display might support touch input. We’ll know more next week and we’ll let you know as soon as we find out more.

Tags: 11.6" netbooks, Asus, Intel Sandy Bridge, ultrabooks

Last updated: March 30, 2012 | Published: October 7th, 2011 | Add the first comment!