Like many ultrabooks, the Asus Zenbook line of ultraportable notebooks sacrifice a few features in order to stay thin and light. There are no built-in DVD drives, and only a handful of input and output ports.
But Asus has a solution for folks that want the portability of an ultrabook and all the features of a full-sized laptop. The Asus VariDrive is a docking station designed to match the aesthetic of the company’s Zenbook line.
The VarDrive features an 8X DVD burner as well as 3 USB 3.0 ports, HDMI and VGA ports, and gigabit Ethernet.
You can attach a notebook with a USB cable, which means you can hook up the dock to a display and other accessories such as a hard drive, keyboard, mouse, or camera and connect or disconnect your laptop with a single cable.
The VariDrive also has an unusual design that lets you twist and fold the entire dock. The whole thing can be laid flat on a table, or you can tilt up the disk drive so that the dock is L-shaped, with the ports on the bottom and the disk drive facing up.
Asus says the VariDrive should be available for purchase soon — but there’s no word on how much it will cost.
why have an HDMI port on an external DVD drive?
Because it’s not just a DVD drive, it’s a docking station!
I wonder if you could fit an entire android system in that thing.
Sadly the docking station connects to a USB port, which suck for display outputs. They should have made a DisplayPort version, that would help DP to become a standard on laptops eventually. Guess have to wait until AMD releases lightning bolt, which can even output 4k res.
senseless: “Yeah, we’ll build superthin ultrabooks and then we wonder, that there is no place for any optical drive or more than 3 connections, so we build also an external docking station” – oh man, I love my Acer Aspire TimelineX 4820TG