Word on the street may be that Asus plans to shrink the number of models in its netbook line. But the company was certainly showing off quite a few new devices at CES this year, even if many of them were simply minor variations on existing products, like the Asus Eee PC 1003HG, which is essentially an Eee PC 1000H with a 3G modem added for good measure. Typically, these netbooks with 3G modems have been more likely to show up in Europe and Asia than the US, but the folks at Netbook 3G discovered two pages on the FCC website that would seem to indicate that Asus plans to bring some mobile broadband enabled devices to the US.
First up, we have the Asus Eee PC 1003HAG, which is the 3G version of the Eee PC 1000HA which has a 10 inch display, 160GB hard drive, and Intel Atom CPU, but no 802.11n or Bluetoth.
There’s also an FCC listing for the Eee PC 904HG, which has an 8.9 inch screen but the same large keyboard as the 10 inch netbook models from Asus. It also comes with a 6 cell battery, multi-touch trackpad, and all the other features you’d expect from the Eee PC 1000 line.
As with most FCC filings, you can find a ton of pictures of both netbooks, including a few images of the internals. There are also user manuals and other documents. But to be honest, these machines are just minor variations on existing models, so the FCC documents aren’t really that exciting.
It’ll be interesting to see if these 3G Eee PCs come with GSM technology (AT&T and T-Mobile in US and Vodafone and T-Mobile in Europe) or EvDO technology (Verizon and Sprint in US and others in Asia) or both.
Both technologies are available on a single card, allowing 3G network access during worldwide travel, with Qualcomm’s Gobi Global Mobile broadband. Last April, it was announced that Dell, HP, Acer, Panasonic, Lenovo, and _two_unnamed_OEMs_ would offer built-in Gobi. Do you suppose Asus is one of the two not named?
As Brad has said, it’s cheaper and more versatile to have an external USB or ExpressCard 3G adapter so you can switch it from one PC to another; but, apparently, reception can be much better with a “built-in” card and a truly built-in antenna.
I envision a world where everybody has a 3G and/or WiMax netbook and can surf in a car, bus, train, plane, doctor’s waiting room, pine thicket, etc, and kiss wi-fi dependency goodbye forever 🙂