If you have a thing for wood-garnished electronics, you'll be pleased to know that Asus finally plans to open shipments on its long-anticipated bamboo-encased notebooks. Two of the company's bamboo notebooks - the U43F and U43JC - are now readily available for preorder via Best Buy, with an ETA of late July, early August. The first is priced at $950, while the second is $1,000.
The least expensive model features a 14-inch LED-backlit display, a 2.26GHz Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, 640GB of storage, and a DVD burner. Rather than rough it with Intel's integrated graphics, the pricier U43JC has a 1GB Nvidia GeForce 310M with Optimus technology. Although some people can get by without discrete graphics, for an extra $50 it seems silly not to opt for the U43JC.
Both units weigh about five pounds and have gigabit Ethernet, 802.11b/g/n, three USB 2.0 ports, HDMI-out, up to five hours of life, and Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit.