Brushed aluminum ultraportables coming from ASUS

ASUS

ASUS has officially announced its upcoming UL series of brushed-aluminum ultraportable notebooks based on Intel’s new dual-core SU7300 ultra-low voltage CPUs. The UL stands for UnLimited — and please notice ASUS’ trendy use of capitalization there. The notebooks will come in a variety of sizes and weights and some models will feature switchable graphics systems allowing you to use an NVIDIA GeForce G 210M chipset for power-hungry stuff, while falling back on the Intel GS45 chipset for maximum battery life.

No word on pricing or availability for any of these systems but they’re all listed as coming with Windows Vista along with an included Windows 7 upgrade, so chances are pretty good that they’ll be available before the end of October when Windows 7 officially ships.

As far as the models go, they are as follows:

UL20A — 12.1-inch screen, 3.3 pounds

UL30A — 13.3-inch screen, 3.3 pounds

UL50A/UL50Ag/UL50Vg — 15.6-inch screen, 4.6 pounds

UL80Ag/UL80V — 14-inch screen, 4.4 pounds

Shared specs include: DVD burner (doesn’t say if it’s internal or external — I’d guess external, though), 1366×768 resolution, built-in 0.3-megapixel camera, up to 4GB of RAM, and various combinations of low-voltage processors (SU7300, SU3500, SU2300, SU9400). Battery life is rated by ASUS at up to 12 hours.

The 14-inch UL80V and 15.6-inch UL50Vg models will have the 512MB NVIDIA GeForce G 210M graphics alongside the Intel GS45 chipset. The other models all contain just Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics.

UnLimited Possibilities — Introducing ASUS UL Series Notebooks [ASUS.com]