Asus, Eee, netbook

I’ve been watching the news, but there’s really not a whole lot that has been exciting in the last few days, outside of the rampant Apple speculation. Sure, the MSI Wind U120 netbook has been revealed, but I’m not really into “business” computers (or netbooks, for that matter), so I really can’t bring myself to write about it. It’s not that it’s bad, but it’d just come off as total desperation for a post. With that in mind, here’s something that I initially passed on but have decided to bring up: Asus is continuing their onslaught of Eee PCs with a small assortment of announcements.

I’m honestly not sure how I feel about this yet because Asus is basically responsible for creating the netbook market to begin with. I don’t want to split hairs with old devices and small laptops that might be able to be considered a netbook, I’ll just say that the Eee was the first mainstream and successful netbook and leave it at that.

With that in mind, they’re going to be adding more new models (seriously, how many will this be now? 50+?) in the near future, but not quite as near as the impending Asus S101 netbook or the Asus N1 notebook that are out soon.

Essentially, they’ve said they’re working on an Eee PC with a touchscreen, and while I give tablets and touch devices a lot of crap, I admit I’m curious to see what they come up with. Even though the Eee PC 704 wasn’t the best design, it was still pretty unique and I have to give them credit for doing something different from everyone else, so with that in mind, sure, bring me a netbook tablet or netbook touchscreen or whatever.

They’ve also said they’ll start shipping dual-core Atoms in their netbooks once Intel releases them, but keep in mind that the power drain the dual-core Atom brings to the table. If you have a 3 cell battery in your netbook and get one of those CPUs, you’re going to be hurting on battery life. Then again, I can’t imagine anyone will ship a netbook with that combination of hardware, but considering the slew of crap random manufacturers are announcing, I wouldn’t be too surprised.

The last bit of news is sketchy, but they’re planning on releasing a ~$300 netbook next year. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the 704 (or is it called the 4G now?) already at that price? A successor, perhaps? It’s still a little early to say, but I’m sure more details will come out shortly.

Thanks to DigiTimes for the Asus heads-up.