The Asus UL20A is a 12.1 inch notebook with an Intel CULV processor and integrated graphics. It ships with a 47Whr, 4400mAh battery.

The Asus Eee PC 1201N is a 12.1 inch notebook with an Intel Atom 330 dual core CPU and NVIDIA ION graphics. It ships with a 63Whr, 5600mAh battery.

Here’s what I discovered today: Those two batteries are interchangeable. That means if you can get your hands on an Eee PC 1201N battery, you can use it in the Asus UL20A, which is great news for UL20A users.

When I reviewed the UL20A, one of my only complaints with this little laptop is that you don’t get the same kind of 10-hour battery life with it that you get out of the larger, more expensive Asus UL30A. That’s largely because the UL20A comes with a lower capacity battery.Taking an Eee PC 1201N battery and throwing it in a UL20A might help you get closer.

The UL30A that I tested had an 84Whr, 5600mAh battery. So slapping a 63Whr battery in an Asus UL20A probably still won’t give you 10 hours of run time. But it should help you get more than the 6 or so hours that I got in my tests.

I’ve found a few stores that are selling the 63Whr version of the Eee PC 1201N/UL20A battery, including one US site and two UK sites. I haven’t dealt with any of these retailers before, so order at your own risk. It looks like both the 63Whr and 47Whr versions of the battery have the same model number: Asus A32-UL20. If you spot a better way to tell them apart, let us kno win the comments. Prices seem to be ranging from about $72 US to £78 in the UK right now.

I should probably point out that while the two batteries look identical from the bottom (they both have a matte black surface that matches the base of both notebooks), the Asus Eee PC 1201N battery has a glossy section meant to match the glossy back and lid of that laptop while the Asus UL20A battery has a matte finish all around. If you’re a stickler for consistency, this could be a problem. But if you just want to improve the battery life on your UL20A, this seems like a small price to pay.

3DMark06

I happen to find myself with a number of rather of interesting computers at the moment with a nice mix of the latest and greatest in low power, decent performance specs. So I spent much of the afternoon running benchmarks on the following computers:

• HP Mini 311 notebook with NVIDIA ION graphics and a 1.6GHz Atom N270 CPU
• ASRock ION 330 nettop with NVIDIA ION graphics and  a dual core 1.6GHz Atom 330 processor
• Asus UL20A with a dual core Intel SU7300 Core 2 Duo CULV processor and integrated GMA 4500MHD graphics

I ran three different sets of benchmarks on each system. These benchmarks are designed to test CPU and GPU performance. First up, 3DMark06, a widely used graphics benchmark that tests performance for rendering 3D video gameplay. It’s worth pointing out that none of these computers got particularly high scores on this test, but as you can see from the chart above, the two notebooks with NVIDIA ION graphics did significantly better in this GPU-intensive test than the Asus UL20A. Higher scores are better.

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Some of you may have noticed I’ve been a bit quieter than usual over the past two weeks. That’s because I was visiting family in New Zealand.

In case you were wondering, traveling from Philadelphia to New Zealand takes an awfully long time — about 25-30 hours one way. But thanks to a good book or three and some personal tech, the flights were actually relatively pleasant. And thanks to a light weight mini-laptop that I threw in my bag, I was able to keep up on the latest news and lend Lee a hand in keeping Liliputing up to date from the road while still enjoying the first real vacation I’ve had in about two years.

I’m back at home now, but I figured I’d give you a little peek into my travel bag. Here’s what I took with me for pleasure and business purposes.

Asus UL20A

I decided to pick up this 12.1 inch laptop with a dual core Intel SU7300 processor after testing out a review unit a few weeks ago. The notebook strikes a pretty good balance between price, power and battery life, while offering more screen resolution, processing power, and graphics capabilities than you’ll find in most Intel Atom powered netbooks. While I wish the UL20A got better battery life, I’ve found that with the energy saving features turned on, this laptop can run for up to 6 hours, which is slightly better than my aging Asus Eee PC 1000H. I left that 10 inch netbook at home and took the UL20A with me for working on the road and I was quite pleased with its performance.

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The Asus UL20A is a 12.1 inch laptop that offers many of the advantages of a full sized notebook in package that’s not much larger than a typical netbook. It’s small, light, and gets good battery life compared to many larger laptops, but it offers significantly faster performance, better graphics, and a larger, higher resolution display than most netbooks.

The UL20A is the cheapest and smallest member of the new Asus UL line of netbooks. I recently reviewed the 13 inch UL30A, which has a larger screen, a higher capacity battery, more RAM, and a larger hard drive than the UL20A. The UL30A also has Bluetooth, and an HDMI output, both of which are missing on the smaller model. But the Asus UL20A sells for about $200 less than its bigger sibling. Are those features worth an extra $200? Probably. But if you’re looking for something smaller and lighter with a price tag near the upper range of the typical netbook, the UL20A is certainly worth considering.

The model featured in this review has a 12.1 inch, 1366 x 768 pixel display, a dual core 1.3GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 CPU, integrated Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics, 2GB of RAM, a 250GB hard drive, and 802.11b/g/n WiFi.

You can pick up the Asus UL20A from Amazon for $581. There’s currently a promotion where you can get a $75 Amazon gift card for free when you purchase the notebook, effectively bringing the price down to $506.

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Excalibur PC

The Asus Eee PC 1201N is starting to show up for pre-order from US retail web sites. This laptop will be the first NVIDIA ION-powered laptop from Asus. It has an 11.6 12.1 inch, 1366 x 768 pixel display, NVIDIA ION graphics, and if Excalibur PC and a few other retail sites I’ve seen are correct, it’s also one of the few Atom powered netbooks to feature a dual core 1.6GHz Intel Atom N330 CPU.

The mini-laptop appears to have a suggested retail price of about $499, although some sites are taking orders for as low as $489.99.

In tangentially related news, it looks like the Asus UL20A started shipping today. The 12.1 inch laptop with a dual core 1.3GHz Intel SU7300 CULV processor has been available for pre-order for a few weeks, but Amazon says it’s now in stock and shipping.

The Asus UL20A has integrated GMA 4500MHD graphics, so it won’t get the same kind of performance as the Eee PC 1201N when it comes to video games and HD graphics. But it is capable of playing 1080p video and HD Flash video. And the processor is significantly faster which should come in handy for running CPU-heavy tasks such as audio or video transcoding, or surfing the web with dozens of browser tabs open.

This model is available from Amazon for $581, and there’s a promotion right now where you get a$75 Amazon gift card when you order the UL20A, bringing the effective price down to $506.

via Netbook Reviews

The Asus UL20A is the smallest and cheapest member of the new Asus UL family. Like its big brother, the Asus UL30A, the UL20A has a chiclet-style keyboard, Winodws 7 Home Premium, and an Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 CULV processor. But this laptop has a smaller, 12.1 inch display, 2GB of RAM, and a 250GB hard drive.

The Asus UL20A should begin shipping soon, and the folks at Asus sent me one to review. You can check out my unboxing and first look video below.

The UL20A is a tiny bit larger than the Acer Aspire 1410, which has an 11.6 inch display. But the difference is hardly noticeable.

Thanks to the smaller screen size, the UL20A also has a smaller keyboard and touchpad than the Asus UL30A. The keyboard is still fairly large and easy to use, but I think Asus should have thought about dropping the dedicated Home, End, PgUp and PgDn keys on the right side of the keyboard in order to provide just a little more space for the rest of the keys.

The touchpad supports multitouch gestures including pinching to zoom. But for some reason, it doesn’t support two-finger scrolling out of the box. Instead, you can scroll by moving your finger up and down the right side of the touchpad, or left and right on the bottom. Like the Asus Eee PC 1005HA, the touchpad supports “ChiralMotion,” which allows you to scroll continuously by twhirling your finger. I tried downloading and installing the Asus UL30A touchpad driver to see if it added two-finger scrolling support, but it does not. I kind of didn’t realize how much I would miss this feature until I tried using a laptop that looks and feels so much like the UL30A, but which lacks two-finger scrolling.

In terms of size, this laptop may be nearly perfect. It’s not dramatically larger than a 10 inch netbook, but the 12.1 inch display is big enough that I don’t have to squint to read text on the 1366 x 768 pixel screen. The processor and graphics are identical to the Asus UL30A’s, so performance should be pretty good for watching HD video or performing CPU-intensive tasks like transcoding audio or video. But the UL20A does ship with less RAM than the larger model, so that may affect performance to some degree.

I’ll have more details about the Asus UL20A in the coming days. In the meantime, ypu can check out my unboxing video below.

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Amazon

A few days ago I mentioned that Amazon would begin offering customers a $75 gift certificate when they order an Asus UL20A thin and light laptop. Well, the promotion page is now live, and it turns out there’s a bit more to it.

You can also get a $100 gift certificate when you order an Asus UL50A or Asus UL80V. Those notebooks are significantly larger and more expensive than the 12.1 inch UL20A, but if that’s what you’re looking for, the $100 gift certificate might sweeten the deal.

Of course, I’d be happier if they just knocked $75 to $100 off the price, but since Amazon sells pretty much everything from computers to groceries, I suppose a gift certificate is almost like cash. You know, the kind of cash that you can only spend online and not in bricks and mortar stores.

You can find more deals on netbooks, gadgets, and accessories in the Liliputing Deals section.

Asus and Amazon are expected to offer a promotion starting today that kinda, sorta knocks about $75 off the price of the Asus UL20A thin and light laptop.

Amazon is selling the UL20A for $581, which is already about $19 below the MSRP. But starting today, if you purchase the laptop from Amazon, you’ll also get a $75 gift certificate to Amazon, which is sort of like bringing the price down to $506… assuming you plan to buy at least $75 worth of stuff from Amazon anyway.

The Asus UL20A is a 12.1 inch laptop with a 1366 x 768 pixel display, 1.3GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 CPU, 2GB of RAM, and a 250GB hard drive. It has a 7.5 hour battery, 802.11b/g/n Wifi, and a 0.3MP webcam. It runs Windows 7 Home premium 64-bit edition.

The promotion is set to run through the holiday season.

Update: The promotion page is now live, and you can also get a $100 gift certificate with the purchase of an Asus UL50A or an Asus UL80V. Unfortunately the UL20A is still only available for pre-order as of November 4th.

Asus redefined the concept of thin and light notebooks when it launched the Eee PC line of netbooks in 2007. While the Asus UL30A isn’t quite as revolutionary, it’s a remarkable laptop that weighs about 3.7 pounds and gets nearly 10 hours of battery life.

For several reasons, it’s not a netbook. First, it’s too large. The UL30A has a 13.3 inch display. And second, with a MSRP of close to $800, it’s too expensive (although you can find it for about $100 less from Amazon). But Asus isn’t sending out review units of the smaller, cheaper 12.1 inch UL20A, so I’ve been playing with a UL30A demo unit for the last few weeks.

The model featured in this review comes with a 1.3GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 processor, 4GB of RAM, a 50GB hard drive, and a 13.3 inch, 1366 x 768 pixel display. The unit I reviewed was running Windows 7 RC1, but the computer is now shipping with Windows 7 Home Premium.

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Amazon is taking pre-orders for the Asus UL20A-A1 laptop for $589.99. The laptop will be available to the public on Thursday, October 22nd. This will be the first 12 inch laptop from Asus featuring an Intel CULV processor. It’s similar to the Asus UL30A in many respects, but it has a smaller screen, less RAM, and a smaller hard drive. It also gets slightly less stellar battery life.

Here’s a rundown of the specs:

• CPU: 1.3GHz dual core Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300
• Display: 12.1 inch, 1366 x 768 pxiels
• OS: Windows 7 Home Premium (64 bit)
• RAM: 2GB (4GB max)
• Storage: 250G (5400rpm)
• Connectivity: 802.11b/g/n WiFi
• Webcam: 0.3MP
• Battery: 7.5 hours

The price is close to $200 higher than Acer Aspire 1410, another thin and light Intel CULV-powered laptop. But the Asus UL20A has a dual core processor and a longer-lasting battery.

In related news, Amazon is now taking pre-orders for several different versions of the Asus UL30A, which is the company’s 13.3 inch model. All of the new configurations will ship with Window s7. The good news is that while there are still models that will sell for closed to $800 (with Windows 7 Professional or with 4GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive and a 16 hour battery!), Asus is also offering a lower priced option for $680 with Windows 7 Home Premium, 4GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive, a 12.5 hour battery, and a Core 2 Duo processor.