Well all know that Asus releases netbooks from the Eee PC line a lot. Sometimes they tend to release way too many netbook models with the same guts, and with only numbers to differentiate model one from the other, you’re really going to have a hard time figuring out which Asus Eee PC suits you best.
However, if I were going to buy me a netbook right here, right now, I’d go for the Asus EEE PC 1018P in a heartbeat. You know why? Because it’s gorgeous.
The exterior and internal casing is made of brushed aluminum, colored in black or silver. Imagine how solid it will feel in your hands. It’s only 18mm thick, so this is probably the slimmest netbook from Asus yet. As a plus, it also has the chiclet keyboard that made typing on the Eee PC such a pleasure. Well, compared to the original Eee PC 701. It seriously reminds me of the Macbook Air.
Now we actually don’t know the processor, memory, and storage space (also will it have HDD or SSD?) of this mini laptop, but rumors suggest that it will have Intel Atom N455/N475 processors with DDR3 support, 2GB of memory and up to 500 GB storage space. Yep, you read it right. Whoa. I find the RAM a bit disappointing, but it’s easy to upgrade, right?
Now All About Eee PC drew some conclusions from the publicity pictures released by Asus:
- the device comes with a chiclet keyboard and a big trackpad with a single click button and a scrolling area on the right (I love this particular feature)
- it will offer USB 3.0 ports, as anticipated by the BLUE ports on the side
- Bluetooth 3.0 is also rumored to be present on-board, next to wireless Wi-Fi N (not sure about 3G/HSPA though, but it would surely do great on such a business mini-laptop)
- there’s a fingerprint reader on the right, something we haven’t seen on netbooks before
- it will come with Web-cam, card-reader, VGA output and 3 USB ports, but no HDMI (so will use low-powered ATOM platforms)
Since there are no official specs released yet, it’s pretty obvious that the Asus EEE PC 1018P is not yet available. Pricing is expected to reach $600.
If you ask me, it’s worth it, though. What do you think?
