Asus Announces Eee Box B204/B206 With HD

I’ve had a bit of a rough week with a variety of things going on, and the next will be the same, but here’s a worthwhile post for those who haven’t kept up on what Asus has been doing in the last week. If you’re familiar with the Asus Eee Box B202 nettop, then you’re pretty much going to be familiar with the Asus Eee Box B204 nettop and Asus Eee Box B206 nettop, only it’s even better than ever. No, seriously!The Asus Eee Box B202 nettop is an Atom-powered nettop that, while certainly small, has been missing one thing to make it a really good HTPC solution, namely HD decoding. So, what should Asus do, but address that very problem.

I’ve ranted and raved for quite some time now about how Intel has hamstrung the Atom by bundling it with their crappy integrated graphics solution, but Asus has now walked around that little limitation and included an ATi Radeon HD 3400 with the already-cool Eee Box. So, that means that the Asus Eee Box B204 nettop and Asus Eee Box B206 nettop are ready to be plugged into your TV and screw cable and satellite because you have a blazing fast internet connection and XBMC.

The differences between the two different Eee Boxes is mainly that the Asus Eee Box B204 nettop includes bluetooth and battery that “functions like a UPS,” while the Asus Eee Box B206 nettop does not. The rest of the stats are essentially in line with what netbooks have these days, namely the Atom 270, a 160gb HD, 1gb of RAM, wireless and wired ethernet, etc.

Of course, the big reason to go with this nettop is because it now has HDMI. I’ve been pricing out a new motherboard and RAM for my ULV PC, but I’m thinking I may say the heck with that and get an Asus Eee Box B206 when they’re available. If nothing else, it’d be a hell of lot smaller than my current ULV PC.

No word on release or pricing just yet, but I’ll let you know when I know.

Check out Asus’s website for more on the Asus Eee Box B204 nettop and Asus Eee Box B206 nettop.