An eBay seller is accepting preorders for a $96 solderless Acer Aspire One touchscreen kit. While that’s not exactly cheap when you consider the fact that you can pick up an Aspire One netbook for around $300, the fact that you won’t need to pull out the old soldering gun makes the price a bit more attractive.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen netbook touchscreen kits for sale. There’s already a 7 inch touchscreen kit for the Eee PC 701, and another kit for an 8.9 inch screen that will fit in an Eee PC 900.
The latest kit is a bit on the pricy side. But in addition to promising solderless installation, it adds 3 USB ports to make it easier to add modifications to your netbook. And it has Windows, Mac, and Linux drivers. It may be described as an Acer Aspire One kit, but there’s a decent chance you’ll be able to get it to work with similarly sized netbooks. I’ll leave it to someone more familliar with netbook innards than I am to determine whether you’ll need to pull out that soldering gun or other gear if you want to cram it in an Eee PC 901 or Dell Inspiron Mini 9.
It’s also worth noting that this touchscreen kit is from EETI, a company that we already know is working on multi-touch panels for netbooks. While there’s no indication that this particular kit supports multi-touch, it might not be too long before we see a netbook touchscreen that can take full advantage of the multi-touch features of Windows 7.
via Engadget