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.

Should 4GB or 8GB prove to be too small for your Eee PC needs, Green House in Japan has two larger capacity modules that may interest you. There’s a 32GB and 64GB module, and they just slip right into your Eee PC.

Due for release later this month, there’s no official price. That is, the price is listed as “open” on the Green House Web site, though AkihabaraNews claims they’ll be €115 ($144) for the 32GB and €235 ($294) for the 64GB.

You know, in case you were bitten by the netbook bug.

via AkihabaraNews

Best Buy has the Eee PC 900A—that’s the most basic one—for a full $20 cheaper than you’ll find anywhere else. So, for $280 you get the 8.9-inch display netbook with 4GB flash storage (that’s 4GB storage and not memory, mind you).

Unrelated: Seven hours till Wrath of the Lich King!

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.

The Asus Eee PC turned one year old the other day—people danced in the streets! Fun aside, the mag did get a chance to interview the company’s CEO, Jerry Sheen (that’s not him, by the way, just some random guy), to get his thoughts on the Eee PC, its future, etc.

The biggest news here is that Sheen admitted that a touchscreen Eee PC should be available by early 2009. Exactly what these Eee PCs will look like, what form factor they’ll take, he wasn’t prepared to divulge.

You might also be interested in knowing that the company plans to launch Windows 7-compatible Eee PCs by as early as mid-2009. And as we all know, Windows 7 won’t suck.

The Asus EeePC 901 will come with built-in 3.75G networking when it’s released next month. Asus swears up and down that the addition of 3.75G won’t adversely affect battery life, which it claims stands at 7.5 hours. We shall see.

On paper, 3.75G is as fast as 7.2Mbps down and 2 Mbps up. Your real world speeds may vary.

She’s based on that Intel Atom platform. You have your choice of 16GB or 20GB solid state drives, along with 1GB of RAM.

Anecdote: At a café two days ago, some chain smoking businessman—everyone smokes here in Barcelona—was using an Asus netbook. Blew my mind, almost.

And now the 10-inch Asus netbook has dropped down to $505. However, you can get it for even cheaper at mwave.

via Liliputing

Well, it’s revolutionary if you believe what we said before. That article may have been mockery, but it’s so hard to tell with Doug. At any rate, the nice-looking Asus N10 series is out there, ready to be pre-ordered, although at $850 it’s not exactly in the budget netbook realm. I’m sure it’s a nice little laptop, but at nearly a thousand dollars you’re getting on towards full-blown laptops like MacBooks and Thinkpads and I’m not sure the N10 is competitive there.

The “exquisite,” “elite,” “extreme slim” Eee model, the S101 (as seen in the pyramid o’ Eee) has been caught in the wild. I think I’ll let the Google translation do the talking:

ASUS held on the 6th of that meeting, ASUS CEO Jerry Shen Xue on Apple with a paper bag containing Eee PC S101, the imminent end of a sudden display market, the law says that it will become the climax. This Taiwan Eee PC S101 works with samples such as Apple Mac Air’s ultra-thin body, piano paint thickness of only 16 ~ 25mm, the main boutique market.
It is understood, S101 will adopt 10.2-inch LCD screen, processors still use Intel Atom N270 (1.6GHz/512KB L2/533MHz FSB) match 945 GME chipset, will have 32 GB and 64 GB SSD configurations, priced at $ 699 and $ 899 U.S. dollars, is expected to Listed in mid-September.

The climax!
[via Tech Report]

DigiTimes is reporting that Asustek, maker of the Eee PC, expects to increase battery life and storage capacity by the end of this year. The report is exceptionally light, with no concrete numbers and vague promises

Asustek Computer expects to introduce new features for its Eee PC range including “whole-day” battery life and Internet storage.

The question now seems to be, is “whole-day” the same as “One Day Computing”? As reported previously, there seems to be an Eee PC with an extended life battery available, not to mention plenty of storage room.

Recently the company did announce plans to include 3G connectivity to their increasingly popular mini-notebook, adding further fuel to the mini notebook fire. Could it be these external accessories that have sparked the report?

If you’re in Japan and don’t have the scrilla to lay out for an Eee (really though, is it that much?), head over to a Kojima store and pick yourself up one for ¥100, and get a free 3G USB modem. That’s about 75 cents to us Americans. What’s the catch, apart from it only being available in Japan?

Well, first of all it’s the original, 7-inch, 4GB Eee — not exactly a powerhouse, but even the new ones aren’t taking it to the limit are they? Secondly (this is the actual catch), you have to sign up for their service to make that modem go. It’s not really that expensive ($30-60, depending), but unless you know you’re going to use the hell out of it, you might as well just go get an “unlocked” Eee for a song on eBay.

Tweaktown has (in an inexplicably explicitly-worded article) taken apart one of the new, black Eee PCs and checked out all its bits and bytes. To be honest, there’s not much in the way of surprises. It’s mostly common OEM hardware, the expected Atom processor, and the normal layout for webcam, microphone, and all that.

What’s nice though is that because the RAM and HDD are both common OEM, you can very easily replace them with something nicer. The HDD for instance is an 80GB, 5400RPM 2.5″ Seagate. You could replace that with something far more high-performance in a jiffy, likewise the generic RAM. Like we talked about in the podcast last week, though, the Atom processor is going to get the multi-core treatment as soon as this summer, so I’d wait for that before putting together your Ultimate Eee.

TGDaily reports that the Atom-based Eee PC will be coming next week, but they seem rightly skeptical of the little guy. After all, at $650 it’s no longer that cheap (you could get a used MacBook for that price), and not only is the performance not really up to par but it’s a certainty that dual-core Atoms are forthcoming in just a few months so your investment in the chipset would be unwise at this point. As much as I like the Eee PC, this doesn’t seem like a winning flavor.

Microsoft has unveiled a plan under which a somewhat crippled version of XP will be made available to the makers of low-cost PCs like the Eee PC and XO laptop. I’m not sure how I feel about this; at $25 it’s practically free, but the arbitrary hardware limitations Microsoft is imposing are, I think, kind of despicable:

the PC vendors that make ULPCs must limit screen sizes to 10.2 inches and hard drives to 80G bytes, and they cannot offer touch-screen PCs…the systems can have no more than 1G byte of RAM and a single-core processor running at no more than 1GHz.

Really? Single core? No touchscreens? Limiting the damn screen size? What Microsoft has just done is make sure that the most advanced UMPCs and low-cost computers won’t be running Windows. They’re trying to set up the low-cost PC as a separate market, and so it is, but they can’t simple draw a box around the hardware and say “fit this.” It’s not their job. And I really don’t think the Eee PC is going to cannibalize Vista sales, guys, so don’t worry about it.

I have no doubt this will grease the wheels and get more low-cost PCs to market and to the people who need them in developing countries, but at the same time it’s very much Microsoft playing 800-lb gorilla.