14 DAY TRIAL // One of the biggest product releases that was displayed at this year's Computex show in Taipei, Taiwan, was undoubtedly ASUS' Eee PC. Even more, a number of other important manufacturers like MSI, Acer or Gigabyte have released their own version of an Eee PC-like portable computer. And these products have several characteristics in common, besides their support for Intel's Atom of VIA's processors. One of those characteristics verges more on the negative side, as none of them features a built-in optical drive, since there is no physical room for such a device.
Eee PC or Wind users can use an external optical drive as a means of transferring or backing up data from their portable computers. And, because Lite-On is one of the leading manufacturers of storage products, the company has announced that it is going to release external USB slim-type DVD burners in the third quarter of 2008. Lite-On intends to provide support for the above mentioned users, who at this moment have a limited number of choices, as far as external USB optical drives are concerned.
Eee PCs and other similar products can have their total storage capacity extended through a number of USB external HDDs. The market for external optical drives still has potential, as the external HDD market is rather full of various offers coming from a high number of manufacturers. We could easily say that Lite-On is trying to make itself noticed on a market - that of the external optical drives - where, for the time being, there are only two or three vendors.
The external slim-type DVD burners are a great product idea, because blank optical discs have relatively low prices, which makes them affordable for a high number of users. Unfortunately, there's no word on what the price tag of such device will be, and further technical details are yet to be revealed.