One of the first Asus netbooks to ship with an Intel Atom N2600 Cedar Trail processor is now available for purchase in the US. The Eee PC X101CH is a budget netbook with a 10.1 inch display, 1GB of memory, a 320GB hard drive, and a price tag of $280 or less.
Newegg is offering the netbook for $279.99, but you can find it for $10 less at SuperBiiz or Adorama.
The 1.6 GHz Intel Atom N2600 dual-core Cedar Trail chip should offer slightly better performance than the Pine Trail chips used in earlier Asus netbooks. At the very least, this will be one of the first netbooks from the company to be able to handle 1080p HD video playback thanks to Intel’s improvements to the integrated graphics for its Atom chips.
The netbook has an HDMI port and a 10.1 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display. It runs Windows 7 Starter Edition and has a VGA webcam above the display.
One of the reasons this netbook costs less than most 10 inch mini-laptops is that it comes standard with a 3 cell, 23Whr battery instead of the 6 cell batteries that are more common among netbooks these days. Asus estimates you should get up to 4.5 hours of run time out of the standard batter.
Brad you didn’t like the Asus X101 keyboard. After looking at the X101CH, can you verify or not whether the X101CH is the “better” keyboard than what you experienced with the X101. I’d appreciate the insight on that. Bad keyboard is a deal breaker imo.
It appears to have a more standard keyboard. The Eee PC X101 had a cramped keyboard with 5 rows of keys (the number keys were where you’d normally find Fn keys). The X101CH has 6 rows of keys including a dedicated Fn key row.
You can get a better look at the keyboard in this post from CES:
https://liliputing.com/2012/01/closer-look-at-the-asus-eee-pc-2012-lineup.htmlÂ
And this one is actually fanless! Too bad you can’t seem to open it up easily to replace the memory or hdd.
It’s good to see the new batch of ASUS netbooks finally trickle their way in to stores; Amazon should have it within a week.