This isn’t really a mobile story, but a personal comment on a piece of technology I like… almost. You’ve probably seen or heard about the ASUS EeeKeyboard PC. After being announced at last year’s CES, it has been finally launched and the pre-orders have started rolling. Amazon is asking $599 for the device.
But there is one big problem with Asus’ computer – it’s way underpowered. Why on Earth Asus went for the Intel Atom CPU instead of something more powerful is beyond me. Sure, Atom is cheaper and the idea is to make the EeeKeyboard PC affordable, but still – some people may want to use it as their primary computer.
Why not offer an option with Intel SU7300 Core 2 Duo processor? Asus uses that CPU in its UL20 and UL30 notebook series. Heck, there’s also the special version of UL30 called UL30Vt which comes with dedicated graphics (NVidia G210M with 512MB DDR3). Now that would be an ideal configuration for a device like the EeeKeyboard PC. I would definitely consider buying one for myself.
This way – I’m not interested. The idea is cool — wirelessly connect your TV set and do your thing from a comfort of sofa — but execution is poor. I can understand the Atom version exists, but there should be more options which would ship with Windows 7 (instead of XP).
And for the record, I do most of my work on the ASUS UL20. It doesn’t have dedicated graphics (unfortunately), but it’s fast enough and I love it.
Hopefully someone from Asus is reading these lines and will do something about it. 🙂