Asus shows off new portables

WINGING THEIR WAY home from CES, a few executives from Asus stopped by in London to show off some of their favourite highlights from the show.

We managed to get some time with one of the Asus representatives who gave us a short walkthrough of a few of the major features of the Eee PC Seashell Karim Rashid Collection netbook and the prototype audio focused NX90 notebook.

The latest Seashell is the first from Asus to use Intel's Pineview Atom processor. However in this case it's clear that Asus is hoping to distinguish itself in the crowded netbook space with the design, rather than grabbing at some minute difference in specifications as a selling point.

The company tapped the talents of industrial designer Karim Rashid to develop the chassis, which includes a tactile wave like pattern on the lid, covered ports and seamless trackpad.

The second half of the video demonstrates the upcoming NX90, a high-end notebook designed in conjunction with high-end audio specialists Bang & Olufsen. It has a stylish polished aluminium chassis and palm rest, matte-black keyboard and dual touchpads, as well as two speakers which have apparently been designed to offer superior resonance and audio quality.

It's still a prototype, so specifications for the NX90 are still to be confirmed, but the model on display was running an Intel quad core processor and had 8GB of memory, a 500GB hard drive and an Nvidia mobile graphics card, so it's clear that, even if this isn't the final configuration, it's certainly not going to be a slouch. µ