UK Netbook Review

Asus plans to launch several ultrabook models next month. Essentially the idea of an ultrabook is to built an ultra-thin laptop with an 11-13″ screen, coupled with a next-gen Intel chip and a solid state hard drive. Asus, Acer, Lenovo, and Toshiba have all announced ultrabooks already, but Asus was ahead of the curve when it introduced its first ultrabook models in May.

Asus’s Eee PC 1215B is their current 12.1 inch notebook available with a 1.6 GHz AMD E-350 chip or lower power AMD C-30 or C-50 processors. However, Asus has stated that they’ll soon upgrade the Eee PC 1215B notebook with the latest and greatest 1.65 GHz AMD E-450 processor.

Asus will start shipping the Eee PC X101 netbook in September in the US. The netbook we first saw in May will be one of the cheapest 10 inch netbooks ever to hit the market.

The Asus Eee PC X101 is a new budget netbook that uses an 8GB solid state disk and runs MeeGo Linux instead of Windows. Asus plans to launch the netbook in the US later this summer at a price of just $200. We’ve also learned that the company is also working on a slightly different version called the Eee PC X101H which will have a higher capacity hard drive and Windows operating system – and that’s the version that showed up at the FCC web site today.

It looks like we’ll have to wait until September to see the first Cedar Trail netbooks from Asus. At least, that’s when DigiTimes reports that’s when Asus will begin shipping its Cedar Trail machines.