Asus' W5A: A Real Upgrade

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It’s thin, light, sleek and rather “Apple inspired”. Yes, it must be the latest notebook from Asus.

Now, if you are a regular reader of TR your Spidey Sense might be tingling about now. That is because the predecessor of the W5A was re-branded by AJP and released under the moniker of the G220. Check out the review here and you’ll see the W5A has had a rather spiffy upgrade.

For a start it’s been on a crash diet. The old model (2.2Kg) was hardly heavy, but the W5A is ready for the self induced vomiting culture of the catwalk at just 1.6Kg. On top of this is a new architecture built around Intel’s Sonoma chipset, meaning it has a nippy Pentium M 1.7GHz processor with 2MB L2 Cache, 512MB DDR2 RAM and 802.11b/g as well as a 40GB HDD, Bluetooth and a neat 1.3 megapixel (180 degree swivel) camera built in above the screen. Speaking of the display, it’s a widescreen 12.1in with WXGA (1280 x 758) resolution.

Connections aren’t limited either with 3x USB2.0, TV Out, FireWire, PCMCIA, card reader and built in ultra slim optical drive. The only downer is the integrated graphics, but who buys a notebook like this to play games?

There’s no pricing yet, but Asus doesn’t tend to issue its releases too far ahead of the product launches so the wait shouldn’t be long. Incidentally, the price on the G220 was just £757 including VAT. If Asus can keep the price of the W5A something close to that it’ll have made one hell of an upgrade.

Link:
Asus UK

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