The Computex trade show floor is awash with tiny laptops this year. But one of the models we’ve most been looking forward to seeing is the ECS G10IL. Sascha Pallenberg from Eee PC News.de and Joanna Stern from Laptop Magazine managed to find a few pre-production models hanging out at the Intel Atom booth. How do we know these were pre-production units? Well, for one thing the black and white models seemed to have different layouts. Even the touchpad buttons looked different on each model.
While ECS has said it will release 8.9 inch and 10.2 inch models, only the larger unit seems to have made it to Computex. In a nutshell, the computer seems relatively responsive, a crisp display, and weighs just about 2 pounds. Joanna ran a quick boot comparison between the Eee PC 1000 and the ECS G10IL and the Eee PC won by a landslide. But the test was kind of stacked since the Eee PC was running Asus’s custom version of Xandros Linux which tends to boot in less than 30 seconds, while the ECS G10IL was running Windows XP.
Last I heard, the G10IL will cost $500, but there’s no word on the availability yet.