Ion-Based Nettops Coming from ASUS in September

Following reports that ASUS' much-anticipated Eee Keyboard is now scheduled to arrive sometime in October this year, it looks like more details are surfacing on the company's future products. According to industry sources, the Taiwanese manufacturer is now looking to adopt NVIDIA's increasingly popular Ion platform, which is designed to mix a low-power Atom processor with the chip maker's own GeForce integrated graphics processor. The sources indicate that ASUS is planning to launch new Eee Box and Eee Top all-in-one PCs powered by the aforementioned NVIDIA Ion platform.

 

Digitimes reports, citing industry sources, that ASUS will launch new NVIDIA Ion-based nettops as part of the company's line of Eee Box and Eee Top systems. These new solutions should debut next month, alongside two new ultra-thin notebooks, part of the U/UX series. Following the launch of these new products, ASUS is also planning to finally take the wraps off its Atom-powered Eee Keyboard, which was initially showcased early this year at CES.

 

There are only a couple of details available on the new systems, with Digitimes' sources indicating that the 20-inch Eee Top will be featured with Intel's dual-core Atom processor, which should deliver an increase of performance over the single-core Atom N270, used in the majority of low-power systems available on the market. The Eee Top is expected to become available for about NT$22,000 (US$668), while the Ion-based Eee Box is due out for about NT$10,000 (US$304).

 

In related news, HP is also looking to get on the NVIDIA Ion bandwagon, the Palo Alto, California-based PC vendor planning to launch its Ion-based netbook in September, alongside the company's new ultra-thin notebooks. Details on the these new products aren't yet available, but we could learn more in the upcoming weeks.