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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