Netbook Reviews

We have previously written about external USB DVD burners, which you can easily connect to your netbook giving you access to DVDs.

Now, with the ever increasing number of netbooks or “thin and light” laptops, which are powerful enough to playback 1080p content such as Blu-ray movies, but lack a blu-ray drive (or any optical drive for that matter), an add-on USB external blu-ray drive makes perfect sense.

The Asus SBC-04D1S-U USB external slim blu-ray drive weighs just 412g and is very slim at 157 x 142 x 21 mm (W x D x H), and is powered via the USB 2.0 connection.

Asus SBC-04D1S-U (BD-Combo)

If your netbook is powerful enough to playback 1080p content, such as Nvidia Ion powered models, you can simply plug the Asus SBC-04D1S-U into your netbook and watch blu-ray movies. You can either watch the movie on the netbook screen, or connect your netbook up to an HDTV via the HDMI (or other) output and watch it on your big screen.

The Asus SBC-04D1S-U (Asus BD-Combo) can read blu-ray discs at 4.8x, and both read and write DVDs at 8x.

It is showing up at a few stores for between $175 and $200, and should be widely available soon. Via liliputing.