14 DAY TRIAL // ASUS definitely seems to be very active lately, apparently doing its best to grab a stake in as many segments of the IT market as possible, although its most recently unleashed product is not as unusual as others.
The mobile computer market has still not truly found the answer as to whether or not it includes the media tablet segment.
Until it does, ASUS is going on with its many plans, some of which involve the release of new products on the ultrathin laptop market.
The company has released the U36 laptop of this variety in the UK, where it carries a starting price of £700, this being the rough equivalent of $1,122.
For that price, customers will get a solid level of performance in a magnesium-aluminum alloy-covered (on the lid) case of 19mm in thickness.
The central processing unit is an Intel Core i5-460M or i5-480M chip, while 4 GB of RAM (random access memory) and a GeForce 310M 1GB graphics card complement it.
The Optimus technology is supported, meaning that the Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit operating system loaded onto the machine will be able to automatically switch between the CPU's own built-in graphics and the discrete one.
Meanwhile, the 13.3-inch display uses LED backlighting and features a native resolution of 1,366 x 768 pixels.
Furthermore, ASUS put in a hard disk drive with a capacity of 500 GB, plus Altec Lansing speakers, Gigabit Ethernet, a 0.3 megapixel webcam, Bluetooth 2.1, 802.11 b/g/n WiFi, USB 3.0 and HDMI.
Finally, a 5-in-1 card reader is present and a 4-cell or 8-cell battery keeps everything running for up to 11.5 hours.
The rest of what ASUS has been working on recently, or at least a large part of it, deals more with the ARM processing technology and might soon lead to the emergence of not just an Eee Pad Transformer successor, but also a quad-core Kal El-powered laptop.