The Zone

HWM Malaysia was down at The Apartment, The Curve earlier this afternoon to check out BenQ's new range of Joybook notebooks inspired by Pop Art, the S41 and S32! Click the jump for more pics and impressions of the new BenQ Joybooks that sports the latest Intel Centrino Duo chipset.

The keyboard is a full-sized notebook keyboard, so even the directional buttons are of normal size, instead of the usual tiny ones you'll find in some noteboks. The arm rest consist of an aluminum hairline finish, which has a similar design to the HP Pavilion notebooks with the straight line HP imprint. The BenQ design is a bit more subtle and they use a technique which they call laminated color metal.   

The touch pad has a bit of texture to it, though there isn't any design to it compared to the S32 (more on this later). The buttons are a single metal pane with clickable left and right areas. Normally I'm not a fan of such buttons since they can be hard to click but the BenQ S41 touch pad button(s) responsiveness is pretty good and they don't feel hard to click.

It's really hard to see in this picture but the Joybook S41 14.1" notebook display cover has a  subtle circular/squarish design which you can see on the table covering that the S41 notebook is resting on. 

The S41 Joybook comes with an Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T7100, Intel PM965 chipset, NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GS, 120GB SATA HDD, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, and an HDMI output interface. How much is the BenQ S41 Joybook selling for? Only RM3999. That's pretty damn cheap for quite a reasonably high spec notebook. The caveat is that the notebook only comes with Linux OS but you can always buy and install WinXP or Vista later on.

The 13.3" S32 notebook is more for business professionals or those who want wireless productivity on the go. Besides the latest Centrino Duo chipset, it also sports a pretty bright widescreen display of 250nit - the highest display brightness in this notebook size category. The keyboard buttons aren't entirely white as they have a slight transparent look to them. It's quite comfortable to type on without the usual clackatey feeling of cheap keyboards.

Both black and white models of the Joybook S32 touchpads have this interesting wave-like imprint on the touchpad. I couldn't feel any texture from the wavy imprint, but it's still pretty neat effect.

Also available at the show was this 24" widescreen monitor, the BenQ FP241VW. Besides a resolution of 1920 x 1200, it also comes with a brightness rating of 550cd/m2, and a contrast ratio of 1100:1. It's not only capable of displaying full HD1080p, but it also comes with an HDMI port on the back. I think I saw it going at the recent PCFair for a cool RM2699, though the official RRP is RM2899.

The laser-etched buttons on the left side of the display is pretty cool-looking, though they aren't touch-sensitive. 

Chee Fui Chung, General Manager of BenQ Malaysia explaining the design philosophy of the new BenQ Joybooks.

Miss Chee again, holding up another new S32 Joybook model. Unlike the others with the 'Pop Art' design on the cover, this one has a metallic blue 3D-like optical effect on the cover display. According to Miss Chee, there are more of such neat designs in the works.

Miss June Gan, Product Manager of BenQ Malaysia holding up the S32w notebook. I like the metal strip at the bottom of the cover display. It gives the notebook a bit more definition than the standard one.