Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

The popular Asus Eee netbook will soon become touch capable according to Asustek’s General Manager of Eee PC, Samson Hu.  Touch screen netbooks are going to become popular pretty soon so Asustek has decided to jump on the bandwagon and make their Eee’s touch screen capable as well.

Unfortunately, Hu says that the touch screen Eees won’t be ready until sometime in Q1 of 2009.  The good news here is that he also said Asus will have the new touch screen Eees on display come January in CES 2009.  Beyond the touch screens, Hu mentioned that Asustek will be shipping out Eees with the new Intel Dual Core Atom processors.  However, Intel hasn’t announced a specific shipment date for their Atom processors. 

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To coincide with the official launch of Sprint’s 4G mobile broadband service called XOHM (its WiMAX network), four top PC brands have introduced new notebook products which support XOHM.  For those not in the loop, WiMAX is faster than what you usually get from a mobile phone 3G network. 

If you are seriously considering getting a new notebook that fully supports the XOHM WiMAX network, we have a rundown of the new notebooks from Acer, Asus, Lenovo and Toshiba after the break.

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Asus has scored an industry first with its recently announced G71V notebook.  The 17-inch notebook will be the first true mobile quad-core gaming notebook to be released in the market.  While others may have quad-core processors in their machines, the fact that the Asus G71V got it in a mobile computing machine gives the company some bragging rights. 

For those who are fond of overclocking their notebook to achieve maximum performance, they will be glad to know that despite the G71V’s stock Core 2 Extreme chip running at 2.53GHz, Asus didn’t put any hardware restriction on the G71V notebook.  Hence, users can pretty much push the notebook’s performance to rival desktop PCs.  More details after the break.

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The Japanese distributor for Asus has found that a virus has been shipped with the company’s new Eee Box PCs.  The virus, called recycled.exe, is found on the D: drive of the new low cost desktop PC, which launched last week.  When opened, it copies itself to the C: drive and any removable storage device attached to the PC and disables any anti-virus programs it finds. 

It also accesses the users address book and sends itself to everyone in it, visits web pages without the user knowing, disables processes, the Task Manager, the Windows Registry Editor and File Protection system, modifies Windows Security Policies, sends information back to its host (which is presumably a botnet) and more. 

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It seems it did not take Asus long to get back into the endless introductions of new Eee PC models. This new Eee PC 900HA comes not long after we began to get excited over the announcement for the non-Eee branded N10, but it seems that excitement was destined to be short lived.

The latest of the Eee lineup comes in the form of the 900HA, and its hard to think that HA is not standing for ha as in ha-ha, almost like the previous N10 announcement was just a little bit of a tease.

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The netbook craze is huge.  It seems that every day someone else introduces a new netbook.  What makes them different from the UMPC or the Tablet PC classes of computers that never seemed to take off?  Why does this different class of PC succeed when other classes have failed?  I spoke it over with an Associate Editor of Gadgetell.com, Robert Nelson, and here is what we figured out.

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We already know so many details about the Asus N10 since its specs sheet was leaked not so long ago. A product listing at the J&R online store even appeared after the leaked specs sheet. But no official announcement has came out from Asus, until now. Asus Taiwan has officially announced not just the N10 notebook, but a family of N-Series notebooks comprising of the N10, N20, N80 and N50 models.

Featuring the “highly-efficient Super Hybrid Engine,” these notebooks are supposed to be able to preserve battery life up to 35%.  That 35% is “subject to system configuration.” All four new notebooks come with the Express Gate operating system that starts up in 8 seconds to do common tasks such as Internet browsing and listening to music without booting into the full operating system.  Asus has also put in a facial recognition system which eliminates the need to login using a keyboard.

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It appears that Asus is putting a lot more out than just good computers.  Their new 3.5G HSDPA smartphone, the P552w, looks very terrific. 

The P552w has to its credit the first finger-friendly Glide UI user interface, which was developed by none other than Asus.  This interface includes programs like Asus Today, Anytime Launcher, EziPhoto, and EziMusic.

It will be pre-installed with Google Maps and ASUS SMS Location Link software.  There is also a Calendar option which can organize and display the thumbnails of photos users have taken, even the dates when they were snapped. 

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Perhaps due to the overabundance of options in the netbook market, Asus has begun to lower the prices on several of their Eee PC models. The latest two seeing a price cut are the Eee PC 901 and the Eee PC 1000H.

The Eee PC 901, which features an 8.9-inch display with a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, a 12GB SSD and 6-cell battery is down to just $499 on Amazon.

The second model seeing a price cut is the Eee PC 1000H, which features a 10-inch display with a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, 80GB hard drive and 6-cell battery is being found as low as $449 on MWave and $505 on Amazon.

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Considering the popularity of MMO games these days, there are many who want nothing more than to take their virtual RPG characters on the road.  Gaming laptops tend to be on the expensive side, and many will cost a few thousand dollars.  However, Asus has recently released the relatively inexpensive G50V. 

The Asus G50V is packed with many internal bonuses including a 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 processor, an Nvidia GeForce 9700M GT 512 graphics card, and 4GB 800MHz DDR2 RAM. Additional features include a 2.0-megapixel webcam, a DVD burner, plus a 15-inch screen with 1,680 x 1,050 resolution. 

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