Asus appears to be taking various pages from the playbooks of its competitors with the Galaxy 7, a WinMo smartphone with a big 800×480 touchscreen, TouchFlo-like UI, and BlackBerry-esque trackball. Russian site Mobile-Review got a hands-on with an early version of the device – formally called the P835 – and found the build quality to be excellent (metal battery cover, leather around the trackball, soft/velvety plastic elsewhere) although the processor turned out to be a 528MHz CPU, when it was previously thought that it’d be an 800MHz Marvell CPU.

The phone runs Windows Mobile 6.1 with a custom UI shell over the top, drawing comparisons to HTC’s line of TouchFLO devices. Other features include built-in GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, an accelerometer, and a five-megapixel camera. The GSM/EDGE/HSDPA P835 will apparently be available around Europe sometime in March or April for a whopping 20,000 Rubles (about $737 dollars).

[via wmpoweruser.com]

Asus announced on Tuesday that they are releasing two new versions of their Eee Box, with some new features.

The new versions have a high definition hardware decoder (a Radeon 3400), HDMI out and a remote. The hardware decoder should improve performance, possibly making this a decent choice for a HTPC solutions. While the hardware and software seem better, I’d like to see it come in other colors, so it doesn’t look so much like a Wii. No word on pricing or availability yet, although we can reasonably put it above $300 with the added cost of the video card.

Asus has said they will be pushing their price point down in 2009, possibly to escape the overcrowded $300-$400 netbook arena and compete against the far less capable pocket PCs and smartphones that go for two Benjamins. They haven’t said much aside from that, but could it be that the changes they’re making to the Eee Box are going to spread to the EeePC? A Celeron 220 processor isn’t exactly a step up, although it might help them reduce prices. Personally, I’d like to see innovation in form factor or interface, like HP is trying come January.

Damn, the headline should’ve been “Eee’s all about two Benjamins.” Get it? Ah well.

Surprise, surprise. The underpowered nettops aren’t selling so well. Sales are lagging so much that Asus is benching the Intel Atom for the more powerful Celeron CPU in an upcoming Eee Box release. The hard drive is also getting bumped to 120GB from 80GB. Overall, Asus still sees a future over this mini-desktops with 100,000 – 200,000 selling this year and over a million next as it the computer enters new markets. To bad nettops are still sorely underpowered by today’s standard.

Core i7 chips are slowly becoming available so it was only a mater of time before a speed geek got a hold of one and set a world record. The same chap that overclocked a Pentium 4 631 to 8140.4 MHz last year did the tweaks this time around with help from an ASUS ROG Rampage II motherboard. Without taking anything away from him, ASUS claims that the new motherboard, which features small buttons that enables real-time hardware adjustments, made the world record speed of 5510.09 MHz accessible. Still, fancy-pantsy motherboard or not, that’s hella fast fast Core i7 CPU.

ASUS has plans to make its Eee Top PCs a big thing with yet more screen sizes. So far the company has announced a 15.6-inch version of the touchscreen PC, but now the company prez is stating that larger sizes will be available as well. We’re talking both a 20- and 22-inch version. Hopefully, by the time these things drop in the middle of ‘09, the 1GB of ram and 160GB HDD will experience substantial growth.

So far about every major and niche computer maker has announced a Core i7 desktop platform this week and ASUS is not to be outdone. The ROG CG6190 pairs up the powerful Core i7 Extreme Edition with the Intel X58 chipset. The press release isn’t exactly clear but it seems that the box can support up to 12 GB of triple channel DDR 1333 memory and 4TB of hard drives with the graphics being provided by a 3-way SLI and ATI CrossFireX graphics. All this computing power has to come at a price but ASUS didn’t announce how much it will be, nor when it will be unleashed. But damn, this sexy gaming rig packs a lot of power.

Asus launched the incredibly powerful P565 just the other day and here are the first videos showing off what’s under the hood. The left is a HTC Touch Diamond with a not-to-shabby 528 MHz CPU but on the right, is the new champion, rock’n the powerhouse 800 MHz processor. To bad Windows Mobile is the OS of choice, eh?

One more video after the jump.

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ASUS’s smartphones have always impressed and the latest is no different with a monstrous 800MHz processor. The P565 has been rumored for a while but ASUS has gone official with the phone and its ready to rock Windows Mobile 6.1. Besides the 800MHz CPU, the phone is loaded with HSDPA capabilities, 2.8 VGA touchscreen, 256MB of flash memory, 802.1b/g, Bluetooth, and a microSD/SDHC slot which all adds up to show that ASUS knows how to pack a whole lot of goodness into one phone. A custom-built GUI, Glide UI, tries to hide the fact that Windows Mobile 6.1 is still someplace in there which peering at the specs, seems like its Achilles Heal.

DigiTimes is reporting that ASUS is planning to release a 12-inch Eee model similar to the company’s 10.2-inch S101. The netbook would be part of the “ZX” series, which was apparently originally supposed to be a line of full-fledged notebooks. ASUS opted, however, to “deliver a high-end Eee PC product to the market.”

Aside from the ZX series detail, the netbook will also have a 16:10 aspect ratio and “will be launched by the end of the year” for under $30,000 (New Taiwan dollars), which is around $900 USD. I’d guess that if and when the netbook made it here to the states, it’d be priced closer to $600-$700, though. A fair amount of these Eee netbooks priced in New Taiwan dollars seem to hit here for about 25% less.

I’m thinking a little of column A, a little of column B. The story is this: Huang Jin, a student in China, bought an Asus laptop that was having a lot of hardware trouble. She sent it back a couple times and eventually they replaced the CPU, which then started overheating. Examining it, she found it to be an “engineering sample” — an early run CPU made for testing purposes — something which isn’t supposed to be distributed publically.

She got a lawyer and demanded $5 million from Asus or she’d release the media to the public. Asus negotiated with her but eventually rejected her outright and then charged her with extortion. She spent 10 months in jail, and has now been released and is countersuing Asus for damages and the state has dismissed the rest of her term, saying that the evidence was lacking. Quite a yarn!
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Do they just have an idea machine over there at Asus? This thing is great! Of course, it’s not very often that you have to take all the bits out of your PC case and travel with it separately, but if you did this would be indispensible. It’s mid-tower sized and has room for an ATX motherboard and everything. It’s even got front ports. And it folds flat! This is too much! I don’t know why this is so impressive to me; I just love it.
[via HardOCP]

It’s fair to say that many folks are cautiously optimistic regarding the prospects of Windows 7. One reason why, I believe, is its improved ability to run on netbooks. (Vista is sorta unruly on netbooks, as you might imagine.) Laptop mag did the heavy lifting and installed the Windows 7 beta (which is easy to find on the usual BitTorrent sites, by the way) on the Asus Eee PC 1000H.

Surprise, surprise: Windows 7 works quite well on the little guy.

With only a 1.6GHz Atom processor and 1GB of RAM, the Eee PC 1000H was able to boot into Windows in just under one minute—58 seconds, to be exact.

All-around performance seems to be good, too: only about half of the netbook’s RAM was eaten by the operating system. Running fancy applications like Skype and GIMP—calling GIMP fancy must be some sort of sin—also worked well. They even managed to play 720p video with only a few bumps and bruises.

Not too bad, then. And just think: we’re still at least one year away from Windows 7’s release, which is plenty of time to optimize the operating system’s code.

Microsoft, we’re secretly rooting for you. Don’t screw it up. Again.

Asus plans to release a $200 Eee PC sometime in 2009, according to Jerry Shen, the company’s president.

That’s on top of the company’s plans to release a touchscreen Eee PC in 2009. Might we be looking at, finally, the year of the netbook? One can only dream.

While I’m quick to discount netbooks as hallow attempts to bilk you good people out of your money, thereby shoring up these companies’ bottom lines in otherwise dismal economic times, the thought of a $200 almost-laptop is pretty impressive. Who knows, maybe in two years’ time we’ll be looking at a $50-$100 netbook? Doug “netbook” Aamoth will be excited.

There’s an idea – rip apart your Asus Eee PC, sprinkle some modifications here and there, and embed it into your car’s dashboard. That’s just what a guy in Russia did. It appears to be a bit more than a mere weekend project, as he’s added a touchscreen, GPS, Bluetooth, a keyboard in the glove box, and the Centrafuse car PC interface.

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