...but adding sales tax etc will push it into the realms of normal laptops and reasonably expensive ones at that.

Still a 40GB SSD is a nice edition.

Might have to save the pennies (and a lot of them) and get one instead of the 901 with added benefit of buying the better battery.

the Rip-Off Britain multiplier to those prices.

What drugs are those guys at Asus on?

It seems like every week we see an article about the latest model, sometimes before the current model has even been released (here in Aus)

Do they want people to keep putting off buying these things forever?

On top of that I thought the whole point of the eePC was that it is small and cheap. It still seems reasonably small but it's no longer cheap. As others have posted beforehand, you can get a "proper' laptop that is not a lot bigger for not much more with much better specs.

And where the hell is the beach picture?

I bet there's been a deal to prevent direct 1:1 comparisons of the XP and Linux version of the EeePC. I see no reason why they spec those differently.

There's nothing compelling about this line up now. The 701 was great, but to be honest with HP, Dell and the other big boys joining in with a better supply chain then Asus shouldn't have bothered really.

£320 ex VAT and other taxes is the base price - so really it's about £400 all together.

That gets you a 1.6Ghz, 2Gb RAM and a 80Gb HD.

A £400 Dell Inspiron has a Core 2 Duo T5550 (1.83 GHz), 2Gb RAM, 120Gb HD, 15.4" XVGA screen, a DVD-RW drive and Vista HP.

In comparison, where's the advantage of these new EeePC other than paying more and losing peformance for a slightly thinner/smaller lappy...?

An article about the Eee PC and no picture of the Eee PC's beach friend? El Reg, I'm disappointed!

I <shudder> at the thought of how much they'll go for in the UK. It was a beautiful dream, but now it has ended.

Bring back the Golden Age of the Cheap EEE!

Now they're talking, the older versions were simply too small, but a 10" screen and HD.. I may just be tempted to drop my work Vaio :D

The market for these devices is really picking up speed, perhaps in a couple of years we'll see them come with dual gpu's :D

I can see this EEE being bigger and more expensive, which sort of defeats the object I think. I'm sticking with my beloved EEEPC701! :)

...that these machines are getting awfully close in size/weight/price to a "normal" bog-standard laptop?

(not sure about the weight as that's not mentioned but the size and price both keep creeping up on each succesive model)

I don't know. These bigger EeePCs just do not look right after the 701. I wish that they had produced a model with a screen with more pixels, without the bezel, but in the same case.

I can cope very well with the keyboard on a 701, but the screen just does not have enough space, even for some of the default menus.

...where other manufacturers have been before. Asus is riding on popularity of EEE to get into proper ultra portable market.

But what's the point of 40GB (or 80GB) SSD? Cut the d*mn price instead. 20GB is more than enough for this kind of "appliance".

hmm...now getting to £350+...hmm, are they not creeping a little too near other small notebook producers? and can they compete with the bigger boys? and will they keep the 7 incher? hmmm. ponder, ponder....

This range makes the 900 "misstep" look like a product filler and hopefully means that the 900 will no longer be produced and allow for these better versions to be ramped up in production.

I think my 701 will be retired to the car (with case mods and touchscreen added) and a 901 linux taking its place.

The 1000/1000H looks like a good standard laptop but easier to transport ... so ought to grab some market from the "£339" 15 inch Celeron monsters out there at the bottom end.

There is a still a place for a real cheap lappy though below £200 and maybe even something with the original slopping design which is rather good to use (apart from the top heavy issue of the 70x 8-) ... so, ASUS how about an upgrade to a 702 with a Diamondville for £199 ??

Why ship it with XP home? Why not XP Pro? That would be the sensible choice I would have thought.

If it ships with XP home, that means I 'm going to have to install Pro!

What a silly idea

where is she? thats the only reason i read about the eee pc you know.

> You'll note that the Linux model is more expensive, but that's undoubtedly a result of all that solid-state storage and its cost relative to hard disks.

It's also certain to be a result of MS's recent massaging of Asus. Just to make sure that the non-techies (who I'd say are less likely to appreciate an SSD) will go for the XP machine. "What? Less money, twice the storage?"

But what kind of SSD is that supposed to be anyway? Last I looked (yesterday) 16GB SSDs cost between £150 and £450 or so, depending on speed, 32 GB £350 and more.

Where's the beach bird?

S'funny, when I first started writing the truth about craptops in these comments how many "Wow, fantasmagorical...super" comments about supposedly how great craptops are. Now you've all woken up at last and are the job for me [although some of you still need to actually look at the 701 and see it]

Craptops....it says it all.

"A £400 Dell Inspiron has a Core 2 Duo T5550 (1.83 GHz), 2Gb RAM, 120Gb HD, 15.4" XVGA screen, a DVD-RW drive and Vista HP.

In comparison, where's the advantage of these new EeePC other than paying more and losing peformance for a slightly thinner/smaller lappy...?"

I think you answered your own question - "Vista HP" - I'm sure microsoft are paying manufacturers to load that shite on computers, so that Dell would cost at least £470 with XP on it!!!

My desktop Linux box has only 4GB of flash and that's plenty. This 40 GB SSD must be rather expensive, and is unnecessary: what on earth would you use it for? This whole EEE thing has been a case of constantly getting closer and closer to what I want, but never quite hitting the right spot.

Im going to just stick with my x60s. Its perfect for every thing I do and after sitting with the EEEPc for 30 mins I have to say the size was just annoying. Sure its ultra portable but for my needs so is the x60s. You have to love the prices of these EEEPc's though..

love it..Asus rock.

this space is red-hot, right now, imo..

one thing i'd like to know is would it be possible to buy the 1000, with the 40Gb SSD on, and install XP onto it?

i'm dead-set against using normal hard drives for these babies. i think SSD's are the only way to store. roll on cheaper SSD's!!! (end of this year?)

I hope the turbo button goes up to eleven.

Mine's the one with a knee high druid monument standing next to a lead guitarist on it.

*Looks down at my 701 and dreams of the days when Asus weren't so easily corrupted by MS*

b,

Almost certainly. The real, non-conspiracy reason why the Linux box costs more is that they've managed to source 40Gb SSDs for only a little more than the cost of a Windows XP licence + 80Gb HDD. If you've got an XP licence lying around you'll be able to install it on the Linux model.

Because Microsoft are extending support for XP Home for another 2 years (IIRC), just for UMPCs. The reason they chose Home rather than Pro? Probably because they want people to eventually move to Vista as a better product - that's not the case with XP Pro. XP Pro runs reasonably well on my HP2133 mininote, so it'll probably run nicely on the Asus with its Atom CPU.

The entire point of the original eeePC was to make a cheap and portable system that does not rely on a slow, power hungry and liable to knocks and bumps HDD PC. So that model is off my list for starters. We don't need HUGE amounts of space for this. Just a bigger screen! This would run fine on 8GB or less. I was looking forward to a version with similar specs to the 701 and a bigger screen with only a slight increase in the pricetag.

Coat because this seems all about cashing in rather than innovation.

The Asus ad portrays the user on the beach. If only one could. Can you see the screen and text to work in bright sunlight? With any of these small notebooks? Answers please.

Because that makes more sense for a Windows install which by its nature will hammer the disk whatever form it's in.

There are ways round that - XP Embedded, EWF - but this is the easiest option.

You just have to see x86 on the spec sheet to know that they are targetting Windows. Same with OLPC. As soon as that had x86 in it, then it was obvious that a Windows sell out would happen.

Linux runs fine on ARM. In fact there are more ARM Linux systems than x86 Linux systems (I'm counting phones as "systems" and for every Linux server there are ten or more Linux phones). From a technical point of view, ARM is the only sane choice for a Linux mini notebook. ARM-based systems use less battery power, are smaller, lighter and cheaper. All the attributes you want in a low cost sub notebook.

Anyone remember the Psion 7? That was a cute wee mini notebook that ran pretty well on a 100MHz ARM. The modern 600+MHz ARM parts would give it a lot more grunt.