I amaze myself sometimes. You see, I have so much power as a writer on this invincible and influential blog that sometimes I can change an entire industry with but a word.
Case in point: apparently my recent post on Eee’s decision to change the touchscreen to resistive on their Eee Keyboardwas so crushing that they’ve altered their entire business plan and delayed the device to accommodate it. O Mighty Blogger! Thou humblest the world!
Not that USB 3.0 will be useful anytime soon—how long did it take manufacturers to finally get behind USB 2.0?—but Asus’ U3S6 should be, provided it’s not cancelled, the world’s first USB 3.0 + SATA 6.0 PCI-E card. Better news: it’s only $30.
Despite what he said back in August, Asus CEO Jerry Shen confirmed this week that they will in fact be releasing a smartbook product sometime during 1Q2010.
Remember when everything had a capacitive touchscreen, and we decided we really hated those and we wanted resistive ones that required styluses? Me neither. That’s why I’m a little puzzled as to why the Eee Keyboard, which had a perfectly workable capacitive touchscreen when I gave it its first hands-on in January, has been changed to have a resistive screen and integrated stylus. It’s like they produced a concept car, and then when they put it into production, they gave it wooden wheels.
Yum. Here’s the ASUS EeeBox PC EB1501. It’s a tiny “ballerina-inspired design” that features a dual-core Atom CPU, NVIDIA ION graphics, and — gasp!!! — an optical drive?
Well good morning, Interesting Netbook. You have caught my attention thanks to your inclusion of NVIDIA’s Ion chipset, 1366×768 display, 2GB of RAM, Windows 7 operating system, and longer-than-long battery life.
Pretty good marks already for the $799 ultraportable ASUS UL30A notebook, as the machine garners a LAPTOP Editors’ Choice award for its ten-hour battery life, nice design, and adequate horsepower.
I’ll start the day of with a quick and easy CrunchDeal for y’all. It’s an Asus 23-inch widescreen monitor, with a 1920×1080 resolution, for $158 after some sort of rebate. I know $158 for a 23-inch monitor is nothing to freak out over, but most of the ones I found on Newegg didn’t quite reach that 1920×1080 mark. Being that it’s Asus, as Devin told us the other day, we know it’s not junk. That is all. (Don’t click “read more,” since there’s nothing more to read!)
It was just a week or two ago that Asus said they were getting into the e-book reader market, and now they’ve gone and given away some details that sound too good to be true. Dual color touchscreens? Sounds like the OLPC 2, except the Eee Reader may actually make it to market.
ASUS has officially announced its upcoming UL series of brushed-aluminum ultraportable notebooks based on Intel’s new dual-core SU7300 ultra-low voltage CPUs. The UL stands for UnLimited — and please notice ASUS’ trendy use of capitalization there. The notebooks will come in a variety of sizes and weights and some models will feature switchable graphics systems allowing you to use an NVIDIA GeForce G 210M chipset for power-hungry stuff, while falling back on the Intel GS45 chipset for maximum battery life.
If you’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting for an LCD monitor that’s only 0.65 inches thin, your wait may soon be over. Otherwise, a standard monitor ought to do just fine. But if thin’s your thing, ASUS has just announced its line of “Designo” monitors that’ll be available in 20-, 22-, 23-, and 24-inch sizes.
ASUS’ NVIDIA Ion-powered EeeBox PC has gotten sort of official. It’s on ASUS’ website now, at least, although there’s still not much in the way of pricing or availability. The specs look pretty nice, though, with a whisper-quiet setup thanks to a dual-core Atom N330 CPU, 2GB of RAM, 250GB SATA hard drive, 802.11b/g/n wireless, card reader, and, of course, the horsepower to push full 1080p video.
Despite being one of the first companies to bring the idea of small, cheap, no-frills computers to market, ASUS doesn’t think the whole smartbook idea is going to take off. As such, we’ll see no smartbooks from ASUS anytime soon.
Oh, nuvifone. How we loved you and forgot you. Now that almost every featurephone comes with GPS navigation, both of your models might finally launch on AT&T. Just think if you would have got your act together a year ago, you could have ruled the market before there was a market.
Here is a chart. The chart shows that Asus has fewer problems called in per computer than any other PC maker, though Lenovo and Apple are hot on its heels. Now, regular readers will know that I’m not the resident Apple apologist, but in this case I might have to say that they’re not getting a fair shake here.
After all, Asus’ best-selling products have been small, relatively simple machines, many with SSD storage, and lacking high-end, high-heat, newly-manufactured components. That’s not a bad thing, but I’d say it’s also fundamentally less likely to fail.
Sellout.woot.com has a decent deal on the Eee PC 900 today. This model sports the slightly more expensive 20GB SSD option along with the standard assortment of a 900MHz Intel Celeron, 1GB of RAM and 8.9-inch screen. Not to shabby for $189 plus $5 for shipping.
Asus dropped word last week that they would be coming out with the world’s first USB 3.0-capable mobo, and I was itching to make it the basis for my next PC. But then Asus had to go and spoil my dreams by cancelling the P6X58… and why was that again?
Not for any particularly interesting reasons.
God, thanks for clearing that up, Asus!
Among the legion Asus netbook offerings (like Nintendo, “too much of a good thing” means nothing to them), the T91 has stood out due to its swivel-screen and tablet-like design. Whether a netbook version of the reasonably popular (and expensive) convertible laptop/tablets was warranted is really a moot point. Asus was going to make every flavor of tiny notebook they came up with whether it had a market or not. After all, netbooks didn’t really have a market when they came out, did they?
Ah, the netbook. Back in 1999 or so I remember one of my co-workers spent over $3,000 for a mini Sony Vaio PCG-C1, the kind with the tiny keyboard and woefully underpowered processor. Fast forward a decade and we’ve come full circle with the netbook. These still woefully underpowered laptops still have tiny keyboards but they cost a pittance and, for a certain subset of users, they’re some of the most compelling pieces of hardware to come out ofTaiwan and Japan in years.
Origin Story
The netbook was supposed to save the PC industry. Cast your memory back to 2007. We were just on the edge of the global financial precipice. Desktop sales were flat and laptop sales were soaring. All seemed fine. But there was a problem: the laptop market was considerably different than the desktop market. Desktop PCs sat comfortably in a den and were upgraded over time. Junior wanted to play The Sims so he installed a new graphics card. Sis wanted a scanner – she added an all-in-one. Dad was going through a mid-life crisis so he bought a new case. PCs generated sales in peripherals and, once the PC was maxed out, it was relegated to the basement and a new one purchased. PCs cost a pittance to make and could be sold at a slight profit.
Laptops, on the other hand, were stagnant. You bought a laptop and held onto it. For many it became a main computer, but one you never upgraded. You could add some memory and plug in a printer, but you weren’t purchasing overpriced graphics cards or hard drives.
Read More
The ASUS Eee Keyboard has been sliced open and dissected by Blogeee.net (translated from French). The innards basically consist of laptop parts laid side by side with all the ports facing outwards.
