Asus announces two new Zenbooks powered by Ivy Bridge, FullHD screens in tow

Asus announced two new ultrabooks powered by Intel’s oft-delayed Ivy Bridge processor. There are 11.6″ and a 13.3″ versions – Asus Zenbook UX21A and UX31A respectively. Either size will have a FullHD IPS screen – yep, that’s 1920×1080 resolution on a 11.6″ screen.

The IPS screens will offer 350 nits of brightness, but if they are too pricy for you, you can switch to a vanilla LCD screen instead. That drops the brightness to 300 nits and the resolution is downgraded to 1600×900 for the 13.3″ model and 1366×768 for the 11.6″ one.

As to what’s going to be inside the two Zenbooks, you’ll have a choice between Core i7-3517U, Core i5-3317U and Core i3-3217U. The three are dual-cores with HyperThreading and 17W TDP. The top two models are Turbo Boost enabled too.

You also get Intel HD Graphics 4000 GPU, 2GB or 4GB DDR3L RAM (that’s a low-voltage version of DDR3) and 256GB SSD (512GB might be available too).

Then there are connectivity stuff like Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Di (Intel’s wireless HD transfer protocol), 2x USB 3.0 ports and a microHDMI. The keyboard uses a “seamless chiclet” design and will have a backlight.

The Asus Zenbook UX31A (the 13.3″ model) will be 18.3mm thick and weigh 1.3kg and its battery is expected to last 6-7 hours. It will be priced around $1,100.

The Zenbook UX21A (11.6″ model) will be 17mm thick, weigh 1.1kg and have 5 hour battery life. It will be a tad cheaper too at $1,050.

The release date of the two Asus ultrabooks is uncertain, but Asus will have to wait at least until Intel releases Ivy Bridge.

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