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On top of the 11 current flavors of Eee netbooks produced by Asus, yet more devices are due to be released in the next few months…including hardware (and prices) previously thought beyond the ken of the UMPC/Netbook market. According to Asus president Jerry Shen, Intel is anticipating the netbook market demand to exceed a billion units and he feels the Eee brand is well positioned to snag the lion’s share of those purchases.

Shen has stated that two completely new categories of Eees, Ultimate (or S series) and Pro Fashion, are planned for the second half of 2008. These high end lines will include dual-core Atom processors and larger storage (such as120GB HDD or 32GB SSD).

An Ultimate Eee PC with 32GB SSD (S series) will be introduced as early as late September, featuring a 10.1-inch 16:9 ratio LED backlit screen and (supposedly) battery life of 4-5 hours. The Ultimate Eee PC will be priced in the range of US$700-900 and be targeted to the “high-end market”.

A high end Eee? Asus continues to seem to miss the point about the niche market they themselves pioneered. Will consumers pay a price for a “luxury” netbook that could buy them a reasonably powerful mainstream notebook? Somehow I doubt it.

(Source – Digitimes)

Zealot (468 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).