14 DAY TRIAL // Recently, ASUS has mostly been focusing on marketing its super-powered ROG Rampage III Extreme and other motherboards that it demonstrated at CeBIT, with new PC releases limiting themselves to a pair of EeeBOX nettops and a new Eee PC netbook. Still, with a few exceptions, all of ASUS’ products had one thing in common, namely their integration of the USB 3.0 interface standard. Eager to continue this trend, the company has now been revealed to be working on a pair of SuperSpeed-capable laptops based on the Intel Calpella platform.
The two notebooks are known as the 14-inch N82JV-VX020V and the 16-inch N61JA-JX008V. They are built with multimedia purposes in mind, which explains their use of HD screens and high-quality, discrete graphics. Specifically, the notebooks have LED-backlit displays with a maximum resolution of 1366 x 768.
The system configuration itself is built around the Intel Core i5-520M central processing unit and includes 4GB of RAM, a hard drive with a storage capacity of up to 500GB and a discrete graphics card. The N61JA comes with the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5730, which has 1GB of memory. The N82JV, on the other hand, features the GeForce 355M, also with 1GB, but has the added benefit of the NVIDIA Optimus technology, which means it will enable a battery life longer than that of its sibling.
The connectivity and I/O options of the two ASUS notebooks include Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth, an 8-in-1 card reader, 802.11 b/g/n WiFi and a six-cell battery. Also, the devices boast a USB 3.0 port, besides two USB 2.0 connectors. It is interesting to note that ASUS is quite proud of its USB 3.0 lineup, even claiming that its solution can operate roughly 75% faster than competing products.
The N61JA-JX008V and N82JV-VX020V will have a starting price of 1,049 Euro each and will start selling sometime around the middle of next month.