Saturday, September 24, 2011

Asus U46SV ultraportable notebook available for preorder


"Flash Player 11 and Air 3 allow game publishers to instantly deliver engaging games to anyone with a PC, tablet, smartphone, or connected TV," wrote Adobe's Tom Nguyen. "And with Stage 3D, game publishers and developers can take their games to a new level, creating new opportunities for game developers and publishers to deliver and monetize their content." You can find more details and videos here.

Alongside that announcement, Adobe said it's preparing an emergency patch for Flash. The update should drop tomorrow and will address a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2011-2444) that is being actively exploited in the wild by tricking users into clicking on a malicious link via email. Attackers can potentially gain control of compromised machines. Chrome users should have already received the fix automatically.With the constant flurry of ultrabook announcements, thin and light machines have lost some of their wow factor in recent months. Nonetheless, Asus' latest design is pretty attractive if you're on the prowl for a high-performance ultraportable notebook. The U46SV measures just under an inch thick at its thinnest point, yet it comes with Intel's full power Core i3-2310M, i5-2410M or i5-2520M processors, unlike the ULV-bound ultrabooks.

To accompany the full speed Sandy Bridge chips, Asus offers the machine with Nvidia's discrete GeForce GT 540M with a gig of DDR3 VRAM. The machine supports up to 8GB of DDR3 1333MHz of memory spread across two SO-DIMM slots, but most retail units will probably have 4GB. Storage varies depending on the specific model, with mechanical drives spanning from 320GB to 750GB, including both 5400 and 7200RPM spindle rates.

Despite its inch-thick body, the U46SV finds room for a DVD drive, though we'd like to see models with this swapped for an optional flash drive. The system also carries a 14-inch 1366x768 display, a 0.3MP webcam, a 4-in-1 card reader, wired and wireless network connectivity along with optional support for Bluetooth 3.0. Connectors include two USB 2.0 ports, one USB 3.0 port, HDMI and VGA outputs, as well as microphone and speaker jacks.

The system is available for preorder through ExcaliberPC with an estimated ship date of October 1. That particular unit is priced at $879 (supposedly $20 off the MSRP) and comes with a two-year warranty, which includes free two-way overnight shipping for repairs. It's outfitted with an i5-2410M, 4GB of RAM, a 640GB HDD, and an eight-cell 5600MAh battery life that fetches up to nine hours of runtime and pushes the total system weight to 4.85lbs.

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