The 11-inch Asus UX.

Among the handful of consumer laptops unveiled at the Computex trade show in Taiwan, Asus had one of the more interesting, an ultrathin 11-inch clearly designed to take on the MacBook Air.

The 11-inch Asus UX has an aluminum alloy shell with a polished finish, and the company claims that it "draws inspiration from luxury timepieces." The chassis is 17mm at its thickest point and, like the MacBook Air, uses SSD hard drives and even has an instant-on resume feature. (Note that Asus used the name UX for different laptops over the years.)

Where the new UX stands out, at least on paper, is its Intel Core i5 and i7 CPUs. The system on display at Computex reportedly had an Intel Core i5-2557M, which is a full-voltage chip, not a ULV version, but we're not yet sure what version of the more powerful Core i7 will be offered.

Asus also had on hand an updated version of the Eee PC Netbook. This latest version, called the Eee PC X101, has a 10.1-inch display, and runs either Windows 7 or Intel's proprietary MeeGo operating system (a hybrid version of the X101 will run both, allowing users to choose at startup).

The X101 is rumored to cost as little as $200 (likely for the MeeGo-only version), while the UX should be priced a bit less than the MacBook Air. When will these new laptops be available in the US Judging by past Asus releases, we'll probably only know when they suddenly turn up in the catalogs of online retailers such as NewEgg or Amazon.