Asus demos touchscreen Eee Asus has treated CES attendees to a preview of its upcoming touchscreen Eee PC. Eee_T91_01 Asus' touchscreen Eee T91 The T91’s screen measures 8.9in and can swivel to turn the machine into a tablet PC. It weighs in at roughly 2lbs, but is only 1in thick. Many of the machine’s specifications have been kept secret for the …
Hmm, small form factor, touchscreen, and a low cost processor? I had one of these 5 years ago... only it was called the FlyBook, cost £1800 and had a GSM SIM card slot you could use for data as well.
Granted the Transmeta chip was an absolute dog (hot, noisy and slow) but the only thing this has going for it is the Eee's sub-£200 price... oh, wait.
Looking at the extras you can do to yourself then anything more than £275 and its too much. Acer have the upper hand on pricing at the moment so unless Asus undercut them then I expect to see Acer do this to their Aspire One (which makes a great Hackintosh by the way 8-)
As a graphics professional, I would love something small and lightweight that I can draw on. Hope the thing doesn't rely on skin contact to get anything done, and won't scratch with a stylus.
Paper and pencil is a decent bit of hardware (very high resolution) but it won't let me zoom in unless I use a magnifying glass, and working with multiple layers can be difficult as the 10 sheets of tracing paper on top have the annoying effect of applying a white-tinted gaussian blur to anything underneath.
Anyway, I digress.. there's a good market out there for something that is portable and can be drawn on. Previous tablet PCs have been either too expensive (better off buying a wacom cintiq) or not very good at accepting fine pen input. Or both, even.
Ah. bliss.
When I got my first laptop, I was so used to using my psion 5 (the glory days eh?) that I left finger prints all over the screen from trying to move windows and failing to press "ok" buttons...
As soon as one of these lands i'm gonna buy one. Tablet my arse - just need something to fill that psion-5-shaped hole!
My psion would follow me everywhere. I used to write fiction whilst sat in the pub waiting for the missus to finish work. Was rather funny that the modem i had was twice as big as the psion itself. Well, to some people.
Finally the design curve has come full circle, sod those big hulking laptops that pretend they're useful, just gimme the ability to a bit of email and to was my lyrical buds over some more science-fiction/fantrasy stories about rabbits whenever i'm stuck somewhere for half an hour.
Don't get me wrong, I have had the 701 with an upgraded SSD for over a year now. I love it. However Asus has been sorely testing my patience by slapping the Eee moniker on everything that moves, without improving the build quality or the value much. The 701 was really a huge step forward but since then...?
Looks remarkably similar to the vapourware Gigabyte M912. I spent half of last year waiting for that damn thing to materialise, before finally giving in and buying an Acer Aspire One.
If this thing actually appears any time soon, isn't too much more expensive than other netbooks, and features built-in 3G, this is my next machine for sure.
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