This little guy won’t win any benchmarking contests or even play Hulu all that well. But it will run a word processor, web browser and solitaire just fine. Plus it has a webcam so you can keep in touch with the ‘rents while you’re away at school. Neato!.

Do you know the one thing that I absolutely love about my BlackBerry? The little LED indicator light. That single light informs me when I have a new message, if a call is coming in, if Bluetooth is turned on, and a whole lot more. So why isn’t there such a light on computers? One modder answered that question by installed a three-color LED light on his Eee PC with a very similar functionality.

The light sits atop the screen so it can be seen if the lid is open or closed. Whenever a Twitter, Pidgin, or Gmail message comes in, it flashes a different color. Now when can this same thing be available on commercial products? I’m looking at you, Apple.

JustBlair via lillputing

The site contains a couple small text blurbs, and several variations of the same commercial showing a family using an Eee PC running Windows. As far as I’m concerned, the page may as well have been written by Gerald Holmes for all the substantive information it provides. Very little of what’s shown in the commercials are Microsoft specific benefits: there are productivity and video chat solutions for Linux, and I’ve not had many problems with USB-connected devices lately, either.

One astute Slashdot commenter suggests that this site has little to do with Asus directly, and more to do with the Goliath that is Microsoft PR.

Anyway, happy Thursday, everyone!

Via Slashdot.

Touch the Web on ASUS Eee Top PC with Opera browser

Oslo, Norway and Taipei, Taiwan — February 16, 2009 – ASUS has once again reinvented modern computing with its recently launched Eee Top PC, all-in-one touchscreen computer. Seeking a browser that could adapt seamlessly to its unique touch capabilities, ASUS chose Opera for smooth and easy touch navigation — requiring neither mouse nor keyboard.

Pre-installed on the Eee Top PC 1602, Opera is customized to enable touchscreen Internet browsing. Opera brings drag-and-drop functionality, onscreen panning and an automatic virtual keyboard to the Eee Top PC.

“Opera has always been dedicated to enhancing Web browsing experience. Touch Web navigation is one of the new trends for desktop PCs,” says Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software. “Through close collaboration with the pioneer ASUS, we have optimized the Web experience, making it easy-to-use with a few taps of the fingers.”

Eee Top PC users can also take advantage of four conveniently built-in widgets, which give home-screen access to an Opera Widgets tutorial, an analog clock, a dictionary and a calendar. Opera Speed Dial (providing a shortcut to online favorites) has also been customized for the new ASUS touchscreen computers.

“Eee Top PC brings flexibility into the home with its portable nature and user-friendliness for both new and advanced users. To ensure its success, we required a compatible software solution that could be optimized for the touchscreen computer,” says HH Cheng, General Manager of Desktop System Business at ASUSTeK. “Opera is the premiere touch-browsing solution, as the company has extensive experience in modifying their product for unique devices, such as ours. The result is an interactive Web-surfing session where the human touch is the ultimate navigation tool.”

The Eee Top PC will be available in the US market through ASUS-authorized dealers in North America on March 9, 2009.

Eeeuser forum member TenaciousDre wasn’t content with the Eee’s battery life, but like any real man, he wanted more power. So, he ripped apart his old IBM P2 and Frankensteined the li-ion cells with the Eee’s existing battery pack. Battery life varies depending on what he’s doing, but it ranges anywhere from 4 to 15 hours. But there are some downsides to this mod.

The charge time for this Frankenstein battery is roughly 12 hours and the battery meter no longer registers correctly. That’s sort of a given, though. But on the flipside, TenaciousDre says his little netbook runs 5 degrees cooler because the girth of the battery pack boosts the ground clearance. Crazy.

via Portable Monkey

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

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?

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.

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.

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.