Battle of the Super-Lightweight Laptops Continues

From THESTREET.COM: 

Another manufacturer heard from!
There's Apple's (AAPL) MacBook Air, Lenovo's ThinkPad X300 and others.

All thin, shiny and new -- sporting the latest in laptop fashions: the non-hard drive hard drive. They are officially called solid-state drives -- containing large amounts of flash memory and no moving parts.

In addition to faster promised speeds for accessing your data, these drives are also supposed to be very battery-friendly. The downside is that the drives are bleeding-edge technology and therefore very expensive. When you replace an old-fashioned hard drive with a solid-state drive (SSD), you can make a lighter-weight machine -- but you also come close to doubling the price of that computer.

That brings us to the brand-new Asus U2E. Asus is the Taiwanese firm that makes the super-tiny, super-cute, sub-$400 Eee PC (a Linux mini-laptop soon to spawn a Microsoft (MSFT) Windows XP version. Asus makes an incredibly huge line of computers and computer-related products and is only now starting to market them in the U.S.

The U2E is 2.7-pound laptop covered in leather. It sports an 11.1-inch WXGA screen (1366 by 768 pixels), which tells you the computer's outer dimensions are on the small side. It's 10.9 inches by 7.6 inches by one inch and weighs 2.7 pounds. It can easily fit in a manila envelope too!

As for the insides, the U2E comes standard with a 1.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 3GB of memory (holds a maximum of 4GB) and the only read/write DVD drive available in a superlight. Windows Vista is your only operating-system choice from the factory.