Is the Eee PC brand the fastest growing in the world right now? When it first appeared at Computex in June 2007 it was intriguing, a new, outlandish idea that we genuinely didn’t think would catch on. Low-power internet-only machines for £100? Pah! It’ll never work!
When I had my first hands-on at IDF that September I was impressed, saying “the Eee PC could be a huge success in schools, particularly in emerging markets abroad.” If they’re totally honest, I reckon that’s what Asus thought at the time, too - I find it hard to believe anyone really predicted how big the lightweight laptop would become.Â
Alright, Asus didn’t quite manage to hit that stunning price, but the Eee still struck an unexpected chord with consumers, growing in that short time from a newsworthy novelty, into an early-adopter fad, and onto a social phenomenon. Just count how many you see on the train each morning. (more…)
In the last six months, I’ve spoken to a variety of laptop vendors about netbooks, and the sheer range of opinions and strategies is fascinating.
This week, for example, I was talking to Thomas Teckentrup, the general manager of Toshiba Europe Computer Systems, and his take on netbooks was decidedly downbeat: “We have to find out the usage of these products”, he said, explaining his company’s late arrival into the market and the fact it hasn’t exactly exploded onto the scene - the Satellite NB100 is only available with one specification, and there are no options. “We [still] have to see for ourselves how consumers are going to leverage the features of a netbook,” he later added. (more…)
MSI’s Wind U100 has earned quite a few admirers in PC Pro’s offices, but if there’s one thing lacking from it and all the current crop of netbooks, it’s integrated 3G.Â
Right on cue, MSI have just sent us a few shots of their forthcoming Wind U120, which will be officially launching in January. Draft-N and HSDPA 3.5G will be integrated as standard, and we presume the rest of the specification will be the usual netbook fare. So you can expect an Atom N270 processor, 1 or 2 gigabytes  of memory and probably a 120GB hard drive as a bare minimum given MSI’s propensity towards mechanical disk drives in their notebooks. We have a gut feeling that it might even be the first netbook in the range to sport Intel’s forthcoming N330 Dual-Core Atom processor.
Abbreviations are great, aren’t they? BBC, DVD, HSBC, DVLA, GCSE. Why use normal words when you can take almost as long to recite them as letters instead?
Of course, some conveniently shorten into a series of letters that can actually be said as a single, new word. Think acronyms like NASA, SCUBA, laser. Think VAIO.
Here it is, the Eee PC 901. A minor refresh from the Eee PC 900, but a vital one - this is the first laptop to arrive in the PC Pro Labs with one of Intel’s Atom processors.
It uses the 1.6GHz Atom N270, with its 512KB L2 cache and 533MHz front side bus. Whether this will prove to be faster than the previous 900MHz Celeron remains to be seen; from our tests with the desktop Atom 230, we reckon it’ll prove to be similar, or perhaps slightly slower.
We don’t see many laptops here at PC Pro that are unashamadly devoted to luxury, but this Asus Lamborghini VX3 bucks that trend with a barrage of extravagent features.
The wrist-rest, for instance, is clad in leather, and there’s a gilded Lambo logo on the lid - just so people on the train know that you’ve spent £1,500 on such a quality product. The laptop itself is housed in a smart box and then, inside that, a plush velvet bag. Even the included Bluetooth mouse comes with a little pouch all of it’s own, and there’s a leather-coated mousepad to compliment it, too - and that’s also adorned with the Lamborghini logo.
Today I’ve been reading about not one, but two rather retro developments in the wacky world of graphics cards, and both have left me scratching my head.
The first is the re-announcement by Asus of its XG Station, which brings external graphics to laptops. It was first “launched” early last year, as a way to get GeForce 7-series desktop gaming power via the ExpressCard slot on a laptop - but we didn’t recieve a review sample, and it soon became clear it would never see the light of day in the UK.
That bears more than an uncanny resemblance to HP’s Mini Note, which failed to knock the Eee of its pedestal according to our laptops editor, but will still increase interest in this ultra-low budget market.
So that’s HP and Dell on board, and Acer’s heavily rumoured to be biding its time with an Eee rival of its own. How much longer can Sony afford to hold out? I’ll give it until Christmas.
I’m in something of a quandary. After seeing just how much work I can get done on the train - there’s an awful lot of time to be had in between businessman having fights with their portable bicycles and then hammering away on their Blackberries - I’ve decided to buy some sort of ultraportable laptop.
My motivation is that while I’d like to work on the train, getting anything done at the moment requires more effort than I’d like. Which, ideally, is no effort at all. At the moment, hammering out a review on the journey home involves lugging a (relatively) heavy laptop in an extra bag, with the respective power cables in case I decide to use it when I get home, too. I’d like to condense this down somewhat, and some sort of smaller, lighter laptop stands out, as I’d be able to slip it into my backpack with everything else.
You may have seen a while ago that we examined a new chunk of hardware that - and this may be something of a blessing - will never make it to retail: the Asus EAH3850 X3 Trinity.
We were surprised and, dare we say it, a little impressed: Asus packed three 3850 chipsets onto one PCB and, remarkably, made it work. With water cooling and enough electricity to power Bill Gates’ cash machine - almost 300W for the card on its own, in fact. It didn’t really increase frame-rates much when compared to a single 512MB HD 3850 - adding 3fps to our high benchmark in Crysis - but it was certainly an interesting experiment.
Is the Eee PC brand the fastest growing in the world right now? When it first appeared at Computex in June 2007 it was intriguing, a new, outlandish idea that we genuinely didn’t think would catch on. Low-power internet-only machines for £100? Pah! It’ll never work!
