Posted: August 22nd, 2001
Written by: Tuan "Solace" Nguyen

Introduction

There’s no doubt about it. Things are getting smaller, more portable, faster and beefier than ever before. When PDA devices first started appearing, they were approximately the same size as the ones we see today. However, they were ultra slow, ultra plain, and were more of hype than anything else.

People, who had them, used them for nothing more than calendars and calculators. Their keypads were hard to type thanks to the small tap buttons they called keys. Display screens were made up of gigantic pixels and you can forget about high resolution imaging because most PDA devices during that time could only display two to five lines of information at once.

Notebooks weren’t a pretty picture back in the day either -- Big, bulky, under powered, ugly, and practically uneconomical, you definitely looked out of place if you had one.

Times Have Changed

While notebooks themselves have definitely changed, their core goal hasn’t. They are still meant to be able to replace your desktop system and provide you with everything you need to go totally portable. The major difference between a desktop system and a mobile system is expandability. Although desktops max out at higher speeds than their mobile counterparts, mobile processors don’t stay too far behind.

These days, you’ll find amenities such as DVD and or CD-RW capabilities, 3D sound positioning, high quality speakers (for a notebook), high resolution TFT screens, and some models even have 3D acceleration that rivals that of many desktops. Everything that manufactures are doing contribute to the ongoing struggle to make a notebook that will replace a desktop in every significant way. Right now they are getting very close to doing that. There are a few things that need to be taken care of but that’s their job.

Currently, the fastest notebooks use Intel’s mobile Pentium 3 1GHz processor. While AMD is attempting to make a splash into the mobile scene with Athlon 4, no sudden tsunamis have been seen yet, and Intel still rules the mobile seas. Here to pay homage to that fact is Asus and its line of mobile computing units.

Definitely on a breed of its own, Asus has its own distinct line of notebooks to compete against the rest of the notebook manufacturers that you and I already know about. It may also surprise you to know that many of the well known notebooks out there are manufactured by Taiwanese notebook manufacturers.

Asus however, adds some extra spice in the release of its high-end series of notebooks, called the L8 series. Packed to the brim with cutting edge technology, Asus’ L8 series are ready to make a mockery of even high-end desktop systems.

Next Page