Trying to update its product portfolio before the upcoming holiday shopping season, Taiwan's ASUSTeK has recently announced the introduction of the new N61 and N71 multimedia-series of laptops. Equipped with the latest hardware components on the market, the new laptops combine an exclusive ASUS SonicMaster technology with Altec Lansing speakers and SRS Premium Sound, to provide uses with a high-quality sound and multimedia experience. In addition, the new laptops have been equipped with high-quality, 16-inch and 17.3-inch, LED-backlit displays, each one boasting a 16:9 aspect ratio.

Kicking off with the 16-inch ASUS N61 series, the company has announced two new models, the N61Vn and the N61Vg, with the first boasting improved components, like Intel's Core 2 Quad mobile Q9000 processor, clocked at 2GHz. The N61Vn also comes with two DDR3 1066MHz memory DIMMs, NVIDIA's GeForce GT 240M graphics card with 1GB of DDR3 VRAM, a large-capacity, high-performance, 500GB, 7200RPM hard drive and a Blu-ray DVD combo optical drive unit.

The N71 series is basically an upgrade to the N61 series, also providing users with two new models, the N71Vn and the N71Vg. As far as the system's processor, graphics, and optical drive are concerned, the N71Vn is on par with the N61Vn. However, the system has been featured with a larger, 17.3-inch, HD LED panel and sports a dual headphone input, or a 5.1 channel output. This model is also available with 500GB of storage space, but with the support for a dual HDD configuration, users will be ready to take advantage of up to 1TB of storage, from the same machine.

Unfortunately, there's no word on pricing and availability at this time, but both systems will ship with a choice for a Windows Vista or Windows 7 operating system and a six-cell battery pack.