Asus U, UX Series Notebooks Mimic Parisian Nightfall with LEDs

A touch pad that lights up beneath the fingers and backlit keyboard have Asus making claims of high style for its latest notebooks.

Though Asus’ high-powered Lamborghini VX5 laptop and sleek new Eee 1008HA may have stolen most of the thunder at Asus’ CeBIT press conference, the company has also been at work on less crowd-stealing endeavors. The recently announced U and UX series notebooks sport ultra-thin designs and unique lighting schemes for the style-conscious.

Both notebooks will have LED-backlit keyboards which automatically adjust to glow in the dark beneath the chiclet-style keys, plus touch pads that will actually light up beneath your fingers, following them around the pad. In its own hyperbolic language, Asus claims these features make the notebooks, “reminiscent of the streets of Paris with the evening fast approaching.”

The U series will offer an unusual-size 15.6-inch LED-backlit LED, along with Intel’s Core 2 Duo processor, 500GB of storage, and Nvidia’s recently announced GeForce 105M graphics processor. The company hasn’t elaborated much on the technical details of the UX model, besides specifying that it will use a slot-loading optical drive rather than a tray-based one, to save on weight.

Asus hasn’t yet announced prices, but the laptops are destined to ship in the second quarter of 2009.