Mobility Radeon HD 5870, huh?
Jonney Shih, CEO of ASUS, kicked off the round of press conferences at Consumer Electronics Show 2010 with bullish statements pertaining to market growth in Q3 2009, made possible, he said, via innovations in all fields.Stating that the company's main goal in 2010 is to become a top three mobile-computing vendor - laptops and netbooks, presumably - Shih reckoned that ASUS will continue to launch a barrage of new notebooks throughout the year.
G73 power laptop
Aiming at the 'portable' high-end gaming market first, Shih announced the G73 laptop. Specified with a tilting and backlit keyboard and advanced dual-fan power management, the machine will be equipped with an Intel Core i7 mobile chip and AMD Mobility Radeon 5870 DX11 graphics card, equipped with GDDR5 memory operating at an effective 4GHz - the first manufacturer to officially announce it, we believe. No word on the laptop's price.
Designer-style netbooks
Even though we've heard of it before, ASUS also announced that it's teaming up with Karim Rashid, a celebrated American designer, and is launching the Eee PC Seashell Karim Rashid Collection. The sample machine, presented in a shocking pink, appears to be another method of charging more for what is fairly basic technology based on Intel's Atom platform.
Bamboozled
Continuing a theme from 2008 and 2009, ASUS will also launch an updated range of 'Bamboo' laptops. The all-new U-series is a pastiche of bamboo and aluminium. Equipped with Intel's 32nm Arrandale chips - GPU and CPU on one package - USB 3.0, and auto-switching graphics, there's certainly some substance to the style. Again, we hazard that it won't be cheap.
There you have it, ASUS has presented a number of Intel-powered cutting-edge laptops for 2010. The products are more evolutionary than revolutionary and represent ASUS' thinking for a number of markets. These aren't the designs that will bolster revenue this year. For that we will need to look at the homogeneous £400 models that litter etailers' catalogues.
What's telling is that there were no announcements regarding Qualcomm's Snapdragon 'smartbook' platform, and we had expected Shih to formally announce such a machine during CES 2010. Maybe Intel had a rather strong word and forced ASUS' hand? Feel free to conjecture...we'd love to hear your thoughts.
