Asus to phase out sub-10in Eee PCs, says CEO
Netbook de facto standard to be a 10in HDD model running XP
Buy your 7in and 8.9in Eee PCs while you can - Asus is going to phase them out next year, company chief Jerry Shen has revealed.
Don't expect it to happen all of a sudden - Shen told DigiTimes it'll happen slowly. However long it takes, it's clear that Asus sees the 10in form-factor as the emerging standard for netbooks.
Shen said HDD-based netbooks amount to 70 per cent of the total number of such machines shipped. Windows XP is ahead of Linux by the same percentage he added.
So the 'standard' netbook next year will be a 10in model with a hard drive and running XP - MSI's Wind or the Asus Eee PC 1000H, in other words.
The good news is that prices will plunge. Shen said he expects the company to launch a $200 (£123/€156) Eee PC next year.
That should help drive worldwide netbook shipments to 20-25m units, which is Shen's forecast for the coming year. He reckons around a third of them will have Asus and/or Eee written on the front.
10in Netbook Reviews
Advent 4213
Eee PC 1000
Carphone Warehouse Webbook
Advent 4211
MSI Wind
COMMENTS
It's the form factor, stupid
You can see what sort of pressure M$ puts on manufacturers by Dell's offering. Yes, the Linux version of the Inspiron 9 is a bit cheaper than the Windows one, but it also has less storage and a worse webcam. Why not just add a 'please don't buy this, M$ will alter our licensing deal' sticker on it?
I hope the M$ cheque to Asus came with plenty of noughts on the end, because this is a really stupid decision.
The demand is there for smaller cheaper (no M$ licences to pay for, because who needs Windows to web browse?) physically safer (flash storage = you can drop the damn thing and it will still work) quieter (that flash again) netbooks and someone will fill it.
Unless, of course, Asus hive off the Linux Eees to a separate company...
re: aspire one
Dear twunt - I assume your suggestion was made so concisely because it's all your AA1 battery would allow.
Xandros not up to scratch
Not sure what happened, but on my 701, I managed to fill the root filesystem. but no way could I free up space. Somehow, whatever I wrote on the root fs got copied onto the unionfs copy. Got to the point that the system no longer booted. Tried booting from a USB flash drive (which worked), but was just unable to free any space at all.
This was the second time I had Xandros screw up, and I am a long-term (10 years) Linux power user (and even longer UNIX), and could not fix it. Xandros appears to have a really strange startup process that I just could not get to grips with. Decided to put Hardy onto the system, and once the drivers were sorted, system works fine.
I like the idea of unionfs, but I just could not fathom what was going on. As far as I was aware, the read-only copy was supposed to never change, so you could restore the system to just-installed condition.
Xandros is probably fine for the simple mode, but I would not choose it as a general purpose Linux distro.
I am ASUS - hear me roar.
You'll want what we tell you to want.
Now shut it.
