Asus launches next-gen Eee PC, the 901

ASUS RECENTLY recently pioneered the low-cost near-full-feature "Nettop" mobiles with its Eee PC. The breadth of the response can be seen by MSI, Acer and others quickly launching their own flavours of this approach - check MSI WindPC for instance - and, of course, Asus' sales figures.

Asus has announced here the next generation Eee based on the Intel Atom, the Eee PC 901, 100 and 1000H under the guise of "shockproof affordable computing" as one Asuser put it.

Interestingly, the firm chose the upmarket Shinkong Mitsukoshi department store near the old Computex ground - precisely, a club near the top of the building - for the event. Yeah, you gotta get some rain walking along the way and no, there aren't big crowds to bump into non stop.

The near full hall hosted the hacks and plenty of Asus suits, and the response seemed generally positive. After all, the machines have longer batter life of up to 7.8 hours - remember: "up to" - refined power management, up to 20 GB SSD storage in total for the 9-inch model and 40 GB SSD for the 10-inch model and yeah, up to 2 GB memory. Also, the 1000H is the first HDD-based Eee PC.

Actually, except for the smallish 1024x600 wide SVGA graphics resolution, these little gadgets have pretty much all the standard notebook functionality: 802.11n wireless (WiMax isn't in yet), hi-def audio, webcam, stereo speakers and so on. As expected, the PC901 Linux version has more SSD storage than the Windows XP one - 20 GB vs 12 GB. So, the Windoze malware tax takes away 8 GB in a flash, pun intended.

So OK, the newbies look good, and, in this US$300+ class of systems, they are a value for money, even the Windows version.

Now, more interesting is all the bang and marketing push for the Asus brand. Yesterday, its Ares high-end gaming PC, an upcoming direct competitor to HP VoodooPC and Dell Alienware, received one of those inaugural Computex Design & Innovation awards.

Of course, those "awards" may have the same critical acclaim and value as, say, EuroSong - the Eurovision song contest with all kinds of "point award" shenanigans for our non European readers. But, an award is an award - ABBA made their billion-$ carreer on an EuroSong win.

Asus could do the same worldwide, once the branded product quality, design, performance and price is known and supported, and, talking about support, Asus makes sure that their global service & support do deliver on the dot, we'll be talking of a humongous brand sales opening for everything from the little cheap Eee PC to the high-class Ares gaming rig. µ