Asus will launch Ultrabook laptops today

TAIWANESE HARDWARE MAKER Asus will launch its UX line of Ultrabook laptops tonight.

We first saw the UX21 at Computex in Taipei back in June, where the firm gave us a look at its slender form and shiny aluminium shell. It will be the smaller of the two laptops at 11.6in.

The UX31 is the larger version at 13.3in, with both incorporating the ultra-thin 3mm design. Both laptops will come with Windows 7. The UX21 will be powered by an Intel Sandy Bridge Core i5 processor and the UX31 will have a faster Intel Core i7 chip.

The Ultrabook brand could be described as a PC version of the Macbook Air. Asus is using a SATA3 interface with a solid state disk (SSD) drive for data storage I/O performance.

At last month's Intel Developer Forum we saw Intel focus heavily on next year's Ultrabooks, which will come with Chipzilla's next generation Ivy Bridge processors. µ