Asustek took the wraps off a new family of thin, light laptop PCs designed for long battery life on Monday, the UnLimited family, or UL notebook PCs.
The laptops update an earlier line of U-series devices designed around CULV (consumer ultra-low voltage) microprocessors from Intel. Both series were designed with Apple’s MacBook Air in mind, thin and light for portability. Some laptops in the Asustek UL family have features the MacBook Air lacks, such as lower prices, larger screens and DVD drives, but the MacBook Air beats the entire UL series on processing power.
Every laptop in the new UL series from Asustek is less than 1 inch (25.4 millimeters) thick. They each have a brushed aluminum chassis and components designed to squeeze the maximum battery life out of the system.
Asustek also may have made some breakthroughs in battery performance. The company claims the laptops offer up to 12 hours of power, depending on the configuration and usage. Third party assessments of the devices were not immediately available. Some of the UL series laptops can hold 8-cell batteries, which will give far longer battery life, but also add considerable weight to a laptop.
All of Asus’s UL series laptops come with the latest 1.3GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 processors and Intel GS45 chipsets inside as well as 0.3-megapixel Web cams and Microsoft Windows Vista Premium OSs. They are upgradeable to Windows 7, according to information from Asustek.