14 DAY TRIAL // Asustek's ultra-popular Eee PC was announced earlier this year to come with a significant memory boost and touch screen capabilities along with a bigger LCD display. However, many of the promised features have been stripped down as the Asustek engineers were "cooking" the notebook.
According to Asustek's president Jerry Chan, the 9-incher was stripped down of its touchscreen capabilities. The news was broken during this year's Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas and started a wave of protests in the Eee community, despite the fact that the rest of the promised hardware was still on the agenda.
However, the company just announced that the touch-screen capabilities will be present in the final Eee PC 2.0 refresh. Asustek's vice-president Kevin Lin just spilled the beans and noted that a resistive 8.9-inch display has been added to the sub-notebook's technical sheet.
Expected to arrive in the second quarter of 2008 (around April), the Eee refresh was announced to sell for as much as $500. Yet, according to various reports, the touchscreen capabilities will add some extra $10 to the manufacturing costs.
The second-generation Eee PC will come with 1 GB of DDR2 memory and 8 or 12GB of storage space. It will be able to run Windows XP and, according to a previous statement from Asustek, most of the units will ship with Microsoft's operating system by default. Of course, the older Xandros Linux version will still be available, but the units shipping with it will come with 20 GB of storage space to balance pricing.
The mania around the upcoming sub-notebook in the Eee family, however, encouraged system vendors to artificially raise pricing per unit. According to some rumors in the industry, the second-generation Eee has already started retailing in Philippines for about $800, which would burn the early adopters' budget.