ASUS has two Broadwell products in the pipeline

Oct 2, 2014 09:41 GMT  ·  By

Last month, Intel announced the first wave of Broadwell-powered devices that are expected to make a debut on the market as soon as this holiday season.

Chipzilla’s slides showed us the ASUS Transformer Book T300FA, but information related to its specs was pretty scarce.

Surely, we are all familiar with the Transformer Book lineup, which consists of 2-in-1 machines which run Windows 8.1 out of the box.

A new ASUS convertible is in the making

The Transformer Books are actually tablets that come with a keyboard dock (which most of the times bundles an extra battery) and are quite popular with consumers. That’s why we got pretty excited about the Transformer Book T300FA.

Now, the folks of Notebook Italia have managed to dig up some specs related to the device and even found out what the pricing for it will be.

The ASUS Transformer Book T300FA will be a relatively cheap, fanless hybrid taking advantage of the 14nm Intel Core M architecture and bringing about a TDP of just 4.5W.

But despite Intel advertising the Broadwell machines as extremely light and thin, the Transformer Book T300FA doesn’t seem to be such a product.

The hybrid offers a 12.5-inch display and is 9.9 mm / 0.38 inches thick and 800 g / 1.7 lbs heavy (in tablet mode). Snap the keyboard on and the device transforms into a 20.2 mm / 0.79 inches, 1.6 kg / 3.52 lbs machine.

The ASUS Zenbook UX305 which is also expected to take advantage of Broadwell and is marketed as an Ultrabook, weighs only 1.2 kg / 2.64 lbs and is 12.3 mm / 0.48 inches in profile, so you can see it’s quite a difference.

The Transformer Book T300FA disappoints display wise

Anyway, moving along to dig deeper into the realm of specs. The 2-in-1 will reportedly offer a touchscreen display with the average HD resolution (1366 x 768), which is pretty disappointing to say the least.

Under the hood will live an Intel Core 5Y10 M-800 MHz chip fitted with 4GB of RAM and backed up by 32GB or 64GB of internal storage, to which one can add another 500GB or 1TB of traditional hard drive.

The hybrid also has microUSB ort, mini HDMI out, microSD for memory expansion, headphone jack. The keyboard will bring about two extra full-sized USB ports and one of them is of the 3.0 variety.

The ASUS Transformer Book T300FA is expected to go on sale in the upcoming months for the relatively affordable price of $599 / €599.

ASUS has yet another Broadwell product in the pipeline, in the form of the Transformer Book T300 Chi, which greatly bumps things up in the resolution department to 2560 x 1440 pixels.

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ASUS Transformer Book TF300FA takes advantage of Broadwell
ASUS Transformer Book TF300FA will be one of the cheapest Intel Core M machinesASUS Transformer Book TF300FA with display separated from keyboard
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