14 DAY TRIAL // Asus has recently held a media event at the AsiaD conference, and during the presentation the company has confirmed that is currently working on developing a new netbook series with an ultra-thin design.
The announcement was made by none other than Asus' Chairman, Jonney Shih, who said: "You'll see on our new netbook, it'll be very thin," reports engadget.
The company's rep hasn't mentioned any other details about this netbook series, but suggested that the end product could end up looking similar to the recently launched Asus Zenbooks.
For those of you that aren't familiar with these devices, the Zenbook series is Asus own interpretation of an Ultrabook and comes with a classy ultra-thin chassis that measures no more than 17mm at its thickest point.
This is made entirely out of thin and light anodized aluminum to keep the weight of the notebook down without compromising its durability and is paired together with an all-aluminum keyboard and glass touchpad, which were designed to accentuate the style of the unit.
The Zenbooks are powered by Intel ultra-low voltage Sandy Bridge processors from the Core i5 and Core i7 product lines, come with SSD storage and their displays measure either 11.6- or 13.3-inch in diagonal.
For the upcoming netbooks Shih mentioned at the AsiaD conference, Asus is expected to go with Intel's newly launched Atom Cedarview processors, but there is also the possibility of using Fusion-series APUs developed by AMD.
No matter the processors chosen, Asus will have to use some form of highly compact storage devices, 1.8-inch hard disk drives being the more probable option as SSDs would push the price of the systems to far up.
Outside of detailing its plans on building this new series of ultra-thin laptops, Shih also mentioned that Asus still believes in netbooks, although these devices have to evolve in order to remain relevant.