In what appears to be a response to Acer’s impending 11.6-inch netbook that’s due this month, Asus has plans to release an 11.6-inch Eee PC of its own “later this month,” according to DigiTimes.
Asus president Jerry Shen remarked that the 10-inch crop of Eee netbooks will make up about half of the company’s shipments this year, while the 11.6-inch versions will grab about 30 percent — not bad considering we’re already five months in to 2009.
Asus will apparently also be offering a 15.6-inch ultra-thin low-voltage notebook called the XS15 in July, along with a 13.3-inch model that’ll supposedly fit into the same family. A 14-inch version is expected sometime after that. Pricing for the XS15 will fall between 799 and 999 Euro ($1060 and $1325) depending on the configuration, while the 13.3-inch version will fall between 599 and 699 Euro ($795 and $927).
Keep in mind that the pricing in Euro won’t necessarily directly correlate to how they’ll be priced in US dollars. Competing models from Acer and MSI will likely be priced between $600 and $1000, so it’s likely that the Asus models will be priced accordingly.
Whatever the case, it appears that Asus won’t be placing the same emphasis on ultra-thin Intel CULV (consumer ultra-low voltage) notebooks that Acer will. A separate DigiTimes report finds Asus claiming that only 10% of its total notebook shipments will be of the ultra-thin variety this year, while Acer is expected to ship 50% of its notebooks as ultra-thin models.