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A closer look at Asus' $199 computer

12:13 - Thursday 7 June 2007 by Humphrey Cheung - source: Tom's Hardware

Taiwan TAIPEI - This year’s Computex is proving to be very exciting with Asus’ introduction of their $200 PC. Chairman Jonney Shih introduced the flash-powered portable computer and claimed that it can boot in about 15 seconds. The computer will be available in 7 and 10" screen versions and will run a customized Linux distro.
Shih dubbed the computer the Eee or 3e for short because it is Easy to Learn, Easy to Play and Easy to work. He joked with Intel’s Executive Vice President Sean Maloney saying the name was inspired by Nintendo’s Wii.

The smaller 7" computer weighs 900 grams and will probably have 512 MB of RAM. Asus didn’t specify any CPU or memory specs and even kept prototypes behind glass. However, we did get some hand-on time at Intel’s suite in Hall 4 of Taiwan’s World Trade Center.

The very light machine was running Mozilla Firefox browser and was able to browse web pages quite quickly. An Intel rep told us that the computer will support a wireless connection, but didn’t know if Bluetooth would work.

Asus has not said when the computer will be available.