Asus to revamp Eee PC 901 with bigger keyboard? Asus' latest Eee PC, the 901, hasn't even gone on sale in the UK yet - tomorrow, since you ask - but the company is already preparing the machine's successors. Asian reseller moles cited by DigiTimes claim Asus is working on the Eee 904 and 905. Like the 901, both are expected to use Intel's Atom processor and sport an 8.9in …
It seems the Eee has succumbed to the standard IT product lifecycle:
1) Produce something cheap, clever and well-positioned that everyone wants.
2) Add bloat (a.k.a. enhance the feature set) until it's fat, useless, overpriced and nobody wants it any more.
3) Repeat from 1 ad nauseum.
The way forward would be to make the 901 like the 701 only with bigger HDD and better specs (chip, ram, bluetooth etc). instead of a bigger screen and bigger keyboard and moving parts inside (full HDD).
Keep it small cheap and simple, and newer models have better screen resolutions and more features. Instead of just dragging their customer base upto the normal size variants
Asus have officially gone completely insane.
I can only assume that their fine engineering dept created the first Eee, then the retarded imbeciles in management and marketing sprang into action, and now are attempting to milk that poor cow for all its worth.
A crying shame, they'll be bankrupt in a year at this rate.
Let's make a small cheap computer whose major selling point is that it is - um - small, and - er - cheap.
Now, how can we improve it?
I know - let's make it *bigger* and *more expensive*
Doh...
(Paris because she'd probably want something bigger and more expensive...)
Make a bigger machine just to be able to fit a bigger keyboard is not a good idea unless you want to appeal to users that mainly want to use it as a portable typewriter.
Now these users do exist (I personally know one), but they constitute a much smaller niche compared to the users that simply want the biggest screen in the smallest form factor possible (for a reasonable price).
Launching this as a side product to the 901 and targeting aspiring writers and secretaries may be an idea, but replacing the 901 by this would be suicide, as it wouldn't be able to compete with the acer one and the dell E in the consumer space.
The 701 is still the king of the bunch for me.
I bought one last week for £200. I bought it because it was tiny, and because it was £200. The only thing I would change about it is the fact it could do with a slightly larger drive, say 10gb to not have to butcher xp, and the atom processor with bluetooth. Add those, and I'll have one. Until then, my EEE PC does what it says on the tin, and does it in the true spirit of the EEE PC.
Alien, because ASUS is on another planet on this one...
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