Asus to battle touch-screen Cloudbook with 8.9″ touch-screen Eee PC
Last month, Everex announced plans for an Eee PC competitor (featuring a touch-screen!), but Asus isn’t one to take threats lightly. This month, Asus boss Kevin Lin announced his company’s second generation Eee PC, and it’s boasting several improvements over the original model.
The new ultra-portable laptop features an 8.9" LCD touch-screen, an 8GB/12GB SSD, and a minimum RAM of 1GB, and it will also make use of Intel’s low-cost notebook platform, says the Digitimes. The Eee PC currently tops out at 7", 1 GB (DDR2), and 8GB of SSD love.
The Eee PC was an underdog when it was first released in October of 2007, but Asus managed to sell over 300,000 units before the year’s end. With such great success, a new low-cost, ultra-portable market was created, attracting the attention of other hardware makers such as Everex.
Early in February, the Director of Marketing at Everex, Paul C. Kim, boasted that his company’s new ultraportable — called the Cloudbook — features several improvements over the Eee PC including a larger HDD and an "improved" Linux OS. The Cloudbook was set to be released on February 15, and it is currently available via Walmart’s online store. Kim also announced plans for a better touch-screen model to be released around April or May.
