Considering Asus is moving a lot of weight around in the ultra-cheap laptop market, it's tempting to forget that they do non-cheap premium laptops as well. Case in point, their freshly announced line of Asus M51 series laptops, three pieces of hardware that are definitely not going to price in the $700 range. All three are going to have 15.4" screens, the typical Asus 180-degree built-in 1.3 MP camera, fingerprint scanner security and a separate numeric keypad on the keyboard (we like this), but the internals size up a little differently depending on the model.
The top-of-the-line M51SN, for example, sports a Penryn processor that powers up to 250GB of hard drive space, optional Intel Turbo Memory Technology with 1GB of NAND Flash, NVIDIA GeForce 9500M GS graphics, up to 4GB of RAM, and your choice of DVD, HD-DVD or Blu-ray drives. Given the recent shift in the wind, a Blu-Ray might be more prudent than HD-DVD.
The smaller Asus M51Sr and M51Se, on the other hand, scale down with Intel Core 2 Duo processors (if you call that scaling down) and ATI Mobility Radeon 2400 graphics. No word on release dates or prices yet, but it's expected Asus will keep things fairly reasonable, which means the SquareTrade laptop warranty you put on them will be more than reasonable. Nobody out-reasonables us.
Asus laptop warranty, Asus CES, New Asus
