Product gallery

Alright, I've moved the product into a more colorful area as the white studio environment does not do the product any justice. As you can see, here I switched all LEDs on the M11x (each configurable by section) to red.

If you look at the logon screen where it says 'SENSE', that is facial recognition software, you can login by looking at the webcam, after the learning process the product can bind a username and password to your face. It actually works pretty darn nice and fast.

The funky Alien design is all over the product, just look at the keyboard. A flat backlit keyboard with a tweaked layout designed for gaming, which is funky alright.

To the right we spot audio IO (Realtek 5.1 audio) and two USB 2.0 ports. Unfortunately there's no USB 3.0 just yet for the M11x series.

To the left side we spot some very nice connectivity for external monitors, DisplayPort and HDMI. Again, a USB port, Ethernet (limited to 100 Mbit), card readers (MMC, SD, MS Pro) and a Firewire port. In terms of wireless connectivity, the M11x incorporates an 802.11n Wi-Fi chip.

At the backside all you'll find is the power connector. Since this is a netbook slash UltraPortable, rules and regulations stipulate some limitations. One of them is the lack of a DVD/CD ROM combo. It has to be the biggest downside of this product really. Your solution thus needs to be an external DVD ROM. There are plenty available with USB connectivity, but still.

A little extra bang in a product never is cheap: the M11x starts at $799, and our model with the Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM starts at roughly a full G.