The Computex show starts on the third of June in Taiwan and a lot of exciting things are expected from the show.
MSI is debuting their mini notebook called the Wind. Acer and Dell might be showing off their mini notebooks and it’s generally considered the launch of the Intel Atom chip considering all the above laptops are expected to use the chip.
Asus will be debuting a few products of their own. Firstly the EEE 901 and the 1000 models. The 901 is a 9 inch laptop with an Atom processor while the 1000 is the 10 inch version as a competitor to the MSI Wind.
What interests me however is the release of the EEE desktop version currently being called the Ebox. Basically you’ll be looking at a 1.6Ghz Atom chip, a gig of DDR2 ram and anywhere between 80 and 250 gig hard drives. Bluetooth is also available as well as Wifi and gigabyte Ethernet. It’s important to remember that this machine doesn’t have an optical drive and is roughly the size of an Apple TV or half a Mac Mini. The machine comes loaded with either Windows XP or Linux (assumedly Xandros as with the laptop versions) and should suffice very nicely as an office PC or a secondary PC for browsing the Internet. Early reports say the machine will not be able to run 1080i video but frankly I’ve never met anyone who actually has content in that format.
This potentially could work very well hooked up to a big screen TV. I’m not sure if it could cope speed wise but you could install MythTv on this machine and use it to record and playback shows if you had an external TV Tuner/Capture Device.
Personally I’m finding having a 13 inch laptop a little small on the eyes lately and this machine will be perfect as a primary desktop to do all my documents and internet surfing on. Coupled with a wireless keyboard/mouse set and a nice screen this will be a pretty decent setup.
Pricing is unknown but shouldn’t be overly expensive considering the low price of the Atom chip. June the 3rd will give us many answers but I for one am very excited at the thought of such a tiny PC that will be able to pack so much power into it.
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