Is $499 the Netbook sweet spot?
If computer stores were like supermarkets and had a rack of impulse purchase items right by their checkout lanes, we could easily see the $399 Asus Eee PC sitting next to the candy bars and magazines. After all, for about the same price as a current-generation video game console, you get a smart, reasonably useful 7-inch laptop, for much less than the traditionally inflated prices of other ultraportables.
Of course, we always want a little more, so the Eee PC had to grow, adding a larger 9-inch screen and more SSD hard drive space. Now that we have got our hands on the new version, called the Eee PC 900, it's a definite improvement over the original (check out our full review here), but we're left wondering if the new features are worth the trade-off in price that's driving Netbook-style laptops higher than the $500 mark and blurring the lines between them and traditional bargain laptops.
The Eee PC 900 is $550--still cheap, but a big jump over the original model's $399. We could see picking up a $399 minilaptop for a trip or a birthday gift on the fly, and even $499 might work if we're feeling particularly flush that week, but once you pass the psychological barrier of $500, it stops being something you can justify on the go and becomes a major personal infrastructure upgrade that must be weighed, considered, justified, and often, submitted to the spousal approval process.
Is the $550 Eee PC too far over the line? Is the $500 mark an important psychological boundary? What's your price limit for impulse tech buys? Use the handy commenting system below to let us know.
The 7- and 9-inch models.
The postman brought us a late-afternoon present on this rainy (here in NYC, at least) Friday--the much-anticipated new 9-inch version of the Asus Eee PC netbook-style laptop.
At first glance, it's easy to mistake this for the popular 7-inch version, as the two share a nearly identical footprint. The 9-inch is bigger by maybe a quarter inch, and weighs 2.2 pounds, compared to the original's 2.04 pounds. Opening it up, you can see the display now fills more of the available space, moving the speakers away from the side of the screen.
As we mentioned a few weeks ago, the Eee PC 900 will be available in the U.S. starting May 12 for $549 in both Linux and Windows XP versions. We got the Windows version, which has 12GB of solid state hard drive space (as opposed to 20GB for the Linux version).
We're currently running the 9-inch Eee PC through its paces and will report back with a full review early next week.
The upcoming 9-inch version of the popular Asus Eee PC has already been spotted in Europe and Asia, but details about an American launch were scarce--until now.
Sources at Asus tell us the Eee PC 900, which we discussed in detail earlier this week, will be available in the U.S. starting May 12 for $549. That's a little more than the $500 figure everyone was assuming, and certainly more than the $399 7-inch version.
For the extra money, you do get more system RAM (1GB vs. 512MB), a higher 1,024x600 screen resolution, and more solid state hard-drive space--12GB in the Windows XP version and 20GB in the Linux version.
(Credit:
CNET.co.uk)
We've been spilling a lot of virtual ink about the popular 7-inch Asus Eee PC lately, but the real buzz is about that system's follow-up, a slightly bigger 9-inch version Asus has been teasing us with since last year.
It's now officially called the Asus Eee PC 900, and the first reviews are starting to trickle out in the U.K., where the system has a set release date of May 1, although we don't have an official U.S. price or release date yet.
According to Asus, the new system adds more than just a larger display. The most interesting new feature is something called FingerGlide, essentially a version of the mouse gestures used in Apple's MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, where you can use two fingers in a pinching movement to zoom in and out of images.
Like the current 7-inch Eee PC, the new model will come in both Windows and Linux versions, but the hardware is a little different depending on which operating system you choose. The Windows version has a 12GB flash-based hard drive, while the Linux version has 20GB--we suspect the difference is so Asus can offer both versions for the same price while offsetting the cost of a Windows XP license.
The new 8.9-inch display has a native resolution of 1,024x600, which is a big improvement over the original's 800x480 screen. The CPU is still the same 900MHz Intel (non-Atom), but the RAM has been bumped up to a more reasonable 1GB, from the original's 512MB.
The 7-inch Eee PC sold more than one million units in its first five months, so expectations are high for the new version, especially with Dell and HP offering new competition in the suddenly hot netbook market. We expect the Eee PC 900 stateside sometime in May for about $500.
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