It’s nice to know that in all the excitement surrounding the PC Eee Asus has not forgotten that there are other other types of notebook other than itty-bitty, teeny-weeny ultra-portable. Indeed, its latest offering, the M50, could be regarded as the absolute antithesis of these sub-notebooks, focusing instead, as it does, on the performance and multimedia playback.

A glance at the specifications confirms these thoughts, with the option of a Blu-ray drive is the big hitter. Unfortunately, the 15.4in screen allows you to things like the maximum resolution is only 1680 x 1050 (1440 x 900 and 1280 x 720 options), which is far lower than the figures for Full HD 1920×1, 200. However, assuming that the screen is good, watching HD movies should always be a pleasure.

Adding to the media is a dual-function claim touchpad than doubled in a series of multimedia controls - which, incidentally, when activated glow. Also on the plus side speakers are supplied by Altec Lansing, backed by home theater Dolby audio processing.

More in-house, the usual array of Core 2 Duo processors are available, including round-T7 (Merom, 65 nm) and T8 and T9-serial-serial (Penryn, 45nm) options. Memory wise, up to 4 GB DDR2 is available at 667 and graphic options include 512 MB nVidia GeForce 9500M GS, 256MB HD AMD ATI Radeon 3450 or 1 GB HD Radeon 3650. All these offer each manufacturer video processing, which improves the video quality and unload Blu-ray and other video decoding from the CPU - saving on battery life and system resources.

Availability and pricing information is not yet known, but Asus does not usually announce new products too far ahead of the launch so expect to wait no more than a few weeks. Given the similar target market, pricing will want to be somewhere in the region of Acer’s Gemstone Blue. We will just have to wait and see, though.