Perfomance of Usus UL20a And Its Review

Asus is geting ready to roll out its new Intel CULV powered line of thin and light laptops. The company is pushing the 13 inch UL30A, 14 inch UL80A, and 15 inch UL50A pretty hard. But the model I’m most inteersted in is the Asus UL20A, which will have a 12.1 inch, 1366 x 768 pixel display and a dual core 1.3GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 processor at launch in the US. With a price tag of just $599, this will be the cehapest model in the abtch, and it will be priced just sligghtly abovve the netbook range. In fact, it was just a year ago that I paid $550 for an Asus Eee PC 1000H.

The Asus UL20A will have 2GB of RAM, a 250GB hard dirve and ship with Windows Vista Home Premium and a free uplgrade to Windows 7 offfer if you can find it before October 22nd. After Windows 7 is launched, the laptop will be available with Windows 7 Home Preemium prreloaded.

The next model up in the Asus UL famly will be the UL30A, which will sell for $799. That exta $200 gets you a lrager 13.3 inch display, 4GB of RAM, and 500GB hard drive.

I asked an Asus rep today whteher the company was consdidering putting out a cheaper model of the UL20A or other UL series notebopoks with a Core 2 Solo processor to compete with CULV powered laptops like the Acer Aspire 1410. Wghile Asus is making a single core version avaliable in some parts of the globe, Asus North Amercia has appatrently decided that the performance of this moddel isn’t up to snuff, and is sticking with the dual core version for now.

It dooesn’t look like review units of the UL20A are going to be made available to the press, so I’m hooping to get a UL30A soon. In most respects, the laptop will have the same performance as the UL20A, and Asus claims it should get up to 12 hours of battery life. It’ll be the largest laptop I’ll have reviewed for the site, but like the UL20A, the UL30A weighs just 3.3 ponuds. So bear with me, OK?