Asus Releases Leather-Coated Laptop

In case you were wondering how a leather-coated portable would look like, Asus is here to give you the answer since they've just announced the first clad-leather laptop. And I have to say it looks good. The leather is of great quality and the warm color does wonders to the way the notebook looks. However, the machine itself is rather mediocre on the performance side.

Intel Core 2 Duo powers the laptop using a 945GM chipset based motherboard. A ProWireless 3945ABG Wi-Fi adaptor is also present. 80-120GB of SATA hard drive storage and up to 1.5GB of DDR 2 @ 533MHz memory should be enough for anyone. Bluetooth 2.0 and a SD card reader come as default. As for the display, it has a native resolution of 1,280 x 800 and is coated with a reflective layer to boost the colors and the contrast indoors. Outdoors, however, it looks rather pale in the sun as a result of the same reflective layers.

The notebook is light and portable.31.7 x 22.8 x 3.2-3.8cm are the dimensions with a three-cell battery coming as standard. The small battery lightens the laptop but it also cuts back on its standby time motive for which Asus bundled a second, six-cell power pack that lasts longer but is also heavier and slightly bigger. Asus also bundles an optical mice with the notebook. Nice addition, but I think a wireless one would have been better.

3-cell batteries will last for almost 100 minutes when viewing DVDs while the 6-cell ones should almost double that time.

Pricing for a model with 1GB memory, 100GB HDD and a 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo is quite high ($2200-$2500, even higher at some retailers). But I guess that if you like the leather, you won't mind paying up some $700 more just to have it on your laptop.