Laptop Goes Green: The ASUS Bamboo Series

There's an indigenous Filipino creationist myth that says "Bathala" (the great deity) sent down a bird to split open a giant bamboo and out came "Malakas" (the male, translated as "strong") and "Maganda" (the female, translated as "beautiful").

Well, them technology gods at ASUS just came out with a bamboo fashioned laptop that is supposed to be both strong and environmentally beautiful. The bamboo finish reminds me of my old computer table. I never saw it coming that one day the bamboo would actually be the computer itself.

The bamboo-cladding seems amusing at first but the folks at ASUS are serious, especially in the matter of using biodegradable materials for its products. There's no word from the manufacturer's press release just how environment friendly this particular piece of technology is but the specs would easily rival many top of the line laptops in its class. The Bamboo series comes in both 12.1" and 11.1" models. Furthermore, if you split this Bamboo, you'd find an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and DDR-2 RAM, expandable up to 4GB.

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ASUS claims that the Bamboo computers are energy efficient due to its next generation "Super Hybrid Engine". They stretch the pitch further by saying it "is the first notebook to have survived the unforgiving conditions of snow-capped Qomolangma Peak". That's Mount Everest for those of you who didn't get the chance to read on my previous posts on the Olympics.

A few questions come to mind. How does the bamboo surface fare in terms of the heat generated by the device? Wouldn't it warp as most organic materials do when subjected to heat? Just how much of the skin is made of bamboo? For that matter, the question still remains on how much of the notebook is actually biodegradable and how much of it is just marketing hype?

At any rate, I'm keeping tabs on this innovation. Anything that puts emphasis on going green should be given the chance to prosper, I think.

Personally, I would love to give this handsome equipment a test run. Ahem... attention ASUS. (wink!)