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ASUS Ultrabooks go on sale in the US

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UX21 and UX31 now on sale as rebranded “Zenbooks”

ASUS’s big day has finally come and the Ultrabooks are gearing up to hit US markets today. At their event in New York City yesterday, the company officially unveiled their ultrathin notebooks stateside, and announced that they will be known as “Zenbooks” from here on out.

ASUS chairman Jonney Shih, took the stage at yesterday’s event and introduced their UX21 and UX31 Zenbooks, which come in five different models and are available today. Starting things off, the 11.6” UX21 is priced at $999 and comes in 2 different configurations, while the larger 13.3” UX31 comes in 3 separate flavors, and starts at $1,099.

As far as the hardware on the Zenbooks go, all models feature a thickness of just .11 inches at the thinnest point of their aluminum alloy chassis and come with ultra-low voltage Core i5 and i7 Sandy Bridge CPUs, solid-state drives, and USB 3.0. The UX21 does only feature a standard resolution of 1366x768 pixels, but the UX31 comes with an HD+ resolution of 1600x900 and ASUS is also claiming that both notebooks feature an “instant-on” resume time of just 2 seconds.

Although Acer’s $900 Aspire S3 Ultrabook is cheaper than the UX21’s starting price, ASUS has still managed to fit the notebook within Intel’s sub-$1,000 recommendation. Furthermore, the notebooks ultrathin profile and aluminum design make it quite catchy, and it could end up as an instant bestseller for the Taiwanese manufacturer.  

The notebook is currently available online, and can be ordered from Amazon, Newegg, Office Depot and other resellers.

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Omar Qudsi, 2011-10-12 (Update: 2012-05-26)