Asus has slipped out the Eee Box 1501 nettop, a mere slip of a thing for slapping on your desktop, living room shelves or kitchen.
Nettops are designed to arouse the pockets of folks looking for a cheap secondary machine or a basic media centre, and juggle low cost netbook components with relatively low processing power to produce small, stylish computer for less demanding uses.
Clearly not for hard core Photoshop aficionados then, the Asus Eee Box 1501 comes with a dedicated Nvidia ION graphics chip (which is more powerful than yer average netttop’s integrated graphics) and an optical drive for DVD playback with full 1080p output from an HDMI-out port.
The things buzzes along on a dual core Intel Atom 330 processor, backed by 2GB of memory (expandable to 4GB) with a 250GB hard drive for storage.
There’s 5.1 speaker support plus an upscaler and built in IPTV player for that full-on movie experience, plus 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Ethernet connectivity.
Powered by Windows 7, Asus claim the thing is 50% quieter than most desktop PCs and hoovering up 70% less power consumption.
Measuring a mere 193 x 193 x 39mm, the Eee Box can be either mounted on the back of a monitor or on its stand, and will set you back a reasonable £340.
We have to say that we love the look of these Eee Box’s but we still can’t justify buying one when we’ve got an office stuffed full of laptops and desktops, even if the Asus looks a far more stylish solution.
Still, if it’s setting your wallet on fire, you can pick up a black one
This looks like the perfect thing for mums who want a pc but don’t need anything special…
I think there is a real market for some sort of netbook/top-combi thing- i.e. it attaches to a base station at home that acts as a charger and monitor……… then you unclip it and take it with you as a netbook.
You can do this with a regular netbook and external monitor, but it is a bit fiddly.