Asus set to launch UX21 and UX31 ultrabooks

Taiwanese hardware manufacturer Asus is set to launch its long-awaited ultrabook line-up on Tuesday evening, about five months after it became the first vendor to showcase the new form factor at the Computex trade show in Taipei.

Set to be unveiled this evening are the UX21 and UX31. Seen by V3 at Computex in May, the UX21 will come with an 11in screen and 128GB solid state drive (SSD) while the larger UX31 is set to come with a 13in screen and 256GB SSD.

Both will be powered by the latest Sandy Bridge processors from Intel – in the case of the UX21 a Core i5 and the UX31 an i7 – and will feature a USB 3.0 port.

At Computex, Asus boss Jonney Shih announced the UX21 to a media scrum keen to get a glimpse of the device's slick brushed aluminium casing and MacBook Air-like dimensions.

The UX21 would be around 17mm at its thickest and just 3mm at its thinnest point, he said, weighing in at under 1kg.

Intel president of China, Sean Moloney, added that although ultrabooks would be powered by Sandy Bridge chips this year, Ivy Bridge processors are likely to take over in 2012, with Haswell chips following in 2013 with a target of reducing power consumption by half.