Asus has finally gotten around to putting out an official press release to announce the Eee PC 900. Of course, we already know pretty much everything that’s in the press release at this point, but it’s nice to have confirmation.
Here are a few of the more interesting tidbits:
- Asus says 1 million Eee PCs have been sold since the product launched 5 months ago.
- The company believes the solid state disks are part of the key to the computer’s success. In other words, don’t go expecting a hard drive based model too soon.
- The new 8.9 inch 1024 x 600 display is purty.
- And you can take purty pictures with the new 1.3 megapixel webcam. Older units had a 0.3 megapixel camera.
- Goodbye “multi-touch,” hello “fingerglide.” Asus describes the new touchpad which can be manipulated with two fingers as “innovative,” even though it seems to be a pretty direct ripoff of the Macbook Air/iPhone interface.
Unfortunately there doesn’t appear to be a good picture in the press release, so I grabbed one for this post from Trusted Reviews. If you haven’t checked out their review yet, I highly recommend it. It’s choc full of good information.
what about the price?
No word on the US pricing yet, but it looks like the Eee PC will cost the equivalent of about $513 in Hong Kong and £329 in the UK, which is about $647 USD.
As an undergraduate student studying human computer interaction, it really irks me whenever people describe features as “rippped off” from an apple product just because the Apple product was the first thing they saw that had it. Here is a news flash: Apple invents very little. Two-finger interfaces have been around for many years on experimental multitouch devices, and that research has made its way into a product in the form of the iPhone. Apple absolutely did not invent it.
(Also, Firefox did not invent tabbed browsing, the desktop GUI interface was invented by Xerox, and so on.)