27 November, 2008

Asus Eee Top - All-in-one PC with touchscreen

"All-in-one" PC become more and more popular this days, with Apple Macsleading on this market. Surely, why keep clumsy and noisy black box under your desk with ton of wires hanging, when you can use stylish and wire-free all-in-one PC that sits on your desk and attracts attention? While this market is captured by Apple, many other manufacturers want to have a part of it with their own models. Asus, main player on thenetbook market, decided to enter this domain. Company is extending borders of its Eee PC brand with the interesting hybrid of regular all-in-one PC and Tablet PC - and it looks very similar to all iMac owners. Let's look closer and examine this novelty.

Asus Eee Top - that's how it is named - is a very interesting all-in-one desktop, mainly because it is made with a Tablet PC abilities - wide and bright 15.6 inchedLCD is touchscreen enabled, so it is possible to work with it without mouse or keyboard at all. Another thing that makes Asus Eee Top related to its netbook brothers is Intel Atom 1.6 GHz CPU, which is popular in ultra portable devices due to its energy saving and performance characteristics. Eee Top will also be equipped with 160 GB HDD, 1 GB DDR2 RAM, built-in 1.3 megapixel webcam and internal MMC/SDHC card reader. 

While Eee PC was mainly sold with Linux inside, this one will be sold with Windows XP only (this is a subject to change, so we may see a Linux version later). However, new instant-on feature (copied from Voodoo Envy), which is called Express Gate, is based on Linux, and gives the ability to use basic functions like browsing internet, listening music and talking in Skype even without need to boot up in Windows - this shell boots up in seconds, so it is quite useful if you want quickly send a letter or listen to music.

This interesting model show that Asus is not limited to netbooks only, company wants to widen their product range with some new experimental models. This hybrid includes best parts of its every side - portability and touchscreen from Tablet PC and clean looks with good hardware inside from all-in-one PCs. Let's wait until it will be released, it will be a very reasonable purchase if its price tag of 700 dollars will not change. 

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