Small is beautiful
Keen to build on the huge success of its ultra-cheap Eee PC, Asustek president Jerry Shen has announced the launch of a new family of ‘E’ products, including the E-DT (desktop) E-TV and E-Monitor.
According to Taiwanese tech news site Digitimes, the E-DT will cost as little as $200 without a monitor and is expected to launch in April or May, but will be showcased at Cebit in March. The first models will have Celeron processors “while later generations will adopt Intel's Shelton'08 platform with Diamondville processors and the 945GC chipset.”
The E-Monitor will be an all-in-one PC in the iMac tradition. The monitor size is expected to be 19-inches and there will be a TV tuner built in. It is expected to make an appearance in September, costing around $500. The E-TV is said to be a 42-inch LCD telly with a Linux PC built in. Apparently Asus intends to keep the price premium for the E-TV down to a maximum of $200 above the going rate for a 42-inch TV.
In another story, Digitimes reported Shen as identifying Acer as the Eee PC’s main competitor, with HP deserving an honourable mention. He expects competition to hot up in the second and third quarters of this year, but dismissed the threat of MSI and Gigabyte in this segment.
Lastly, the site also announced the official launch of the appropriately named HTC Shift. This marks a diversification of smartphone specialist HTC’s product line up into UMPCs and is symbolic of the further convergence of the PC and telco sectors.
The HTC Shift will initially be launched in the far east, but a look at the website of smartphone distie Expansys reveals that the UMPC will be available in the UK on the 19th February for a price of £753.15 excluding VAT.
