ASUS Eee PC 701

ASUS has released news about a new laptop, Eee PC 701, they are going to sell. It has been announced to cost around $200.

It is going to be small and lightweight weighing in at 2 lbs. It will have a somewhat full size keyboard and a 7" LCD. There are 4 usb ports and a hookup for an external monitor. The hard drive is flash based and will be 4 gigs in size.

The laptops processor is a Pentium M 900 MHz Dothan on Intel's 910 mobile chipset so it will be able to run any x86 compiled OS. The laptop ships with an installation of Linux but will possibly have Windows available as an option (not that I care). It ships with Firefox and some MS Office compatible software.

The laptop will have 512 MB of DDR2-400 memory that will be shared with the laptops video card.

For extras, the laptop comes with a 56k modem, a 10/100 Ethernet card, video camera, hi-definition audio and a 802.11b/g wireless card. It is said to have a 4 cell battery with 3 hours of battery life.

It can supposedly boot in 15 seconds into the OS for you to then load what it is you want.

All said, I am waiting eagerly for this PC to be released. Its so light and portable and fast booting that it does just what you need without any of the clutter.

My only concern is the wireless card. Obviously its supported in Linux because they are shipping it with what is believed to be a flavor of Xandros. My real question is if this wireless card will support WPA easily or not. My current wireless cards have the RT2500 chipset so the driver for them is in the Kernel with WPA support so setting them up is a breeze.

So, we'll just have to wait and see, but my guess is that ASUS will not disappoint. This laptop has everything the average user needs on the go and gives it to them at an incredible price.

I'm definitely going to try and get my hands on one as soon as I can.

For more information check out these sites below:

LinuxDevices.com

Hot Hardware

PC Pro