Asus announced on Tuesday that they are releasing two new versions of their Eee Box, with some new features. The new versions have a high definition hardware decoder (a Radeon 3400), HDMI out and a remote. The hardware decoder should improve performance, possibly making this a decent choice for a HTPC solutions. While the hardware and software seem better, I’d like to see it come in other colors, so it doesn’t look so much like a Wii. No word on pricing or availability yet, although we can reasonably put it above $300 with the added cost of the video card. → Read More
Surprise, surprise. The underpowered nettops aren’t selling so well. Sales are lagging so much that Asus is benching the Intel Atom for the more powerful Celeron CPU in an upcoming Eee Box release. The hard drive is also getting bumped to 120GB from 80GB. Overall, Asus still sees a future over this mini-desktops with 100,000 – 200,000 selling this year and over a million next as it the computer enters new markets. To bad nettops are still sorely underpowered by today’s standard. → Read More
Remember those unfortunate Eee Boxes we mentioned last week that were shipped with an active virus on the hard drive? Well, Asus is being a big boy about it and has ordered a recall. That restores some of the cred they lost last week, but I’m still wary. Apparently the infection came from a USB stick they were using to test the things. Luckily (or unluckily, depending on how you look at it) they’d only sold a couple hundred of the things before this minor calamity, so there’s not too much damage to pay for out of pocket. → Read More
