On 5 Sep 2008, at 19:52, Malcolm Cadman wrote:
In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Richard Kilpatrick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes
Hi Richard,
Esus seem now to be pushing the "900" series and the latest "1000"
series in their new advertisements. Which are obviously more capable.
So, that is why the "700" series is being discounted.
It's just natural price erosion. It's not being discounted, it's being
reduced in price as the competition and technology improves. Asus'
model range was always intended to be more than just the 700 series,
but a more capable 700 would be an upgrade; the 900 and 1000 are 9"
and 10" screen variants. They have yet to upgrade the 7" model to a
1.6GHz CPU, but that's probably because they're judging the
marketplace to see if having a 7" variant is worthwhile when the form
factor is not really significantly smaller (the keyboard dictating the
smallest usable chassis for what they see this market wanting).
What is significant is that the Eee 701 is the same price as the
Maplin/Elonex Onet "netbook" device, but instead of insufficient RAM/
SSD space to handle modern applications, it's quite a handy little
device and capable of running XP (the XP shipping with various SCCs is
not drastically crippled, it's just XP Home - however, many users
prefer to install an 'nlite' installer packaged version of XP with non-
essential and cosmetic aspects removed. Bear in mind that XP was
developed when 4GB HDs in laptops were commonplace, it's more than
capable of surviving on a 2GB or 4GB machine. It's the size of the
applications and the media we work with that presents the real issue
with storage).
All of these machines bar the Elonex & derivatives are full PC
hardware. The 1.6GHz Atom CPU is perfectly capable of running fairly
serious apps; I have a device called a FlipStart which is a 5.6"
1024x600 display based "pocket" PC, with a Pentium-M CPU at 1.1GHz and
Windows XP. I've used Adobe CS3 on it, Lightroom and even played World
of Warcraft on it, despite the meagre 512MB RAM. The Atom is certainly
comparable with that CPU, though I've yet to test Lightroom's
performance on one of the Atom based machines.
The original 900 with 900MHz CPU is no more capable than the 700. It
simply has a larger screen and SSD.
Richard
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