Asus will launch a touch panel Eee PCs early in 2009 a Company offical in Australia has said. The claim has also been confirmed by Samson Hu, general manager of Eee PC business at Asustek in Taiwan.
Asus will launch a touch panel Eee PCs early in 2009 a Company offical in Australia has said. The claim has also been confirmed by Samson Hu, general manager of Eee PC business at Asustek in Taiwan.
While details about the new model are sketchy SmartHouse and ChannelNews have been told that both MSI and BenQ are also planning new touch model mini tablet notebook. Also set to launch a touch tablet offering is Apple with insiders predicting that the launch could be made at the San Francisco Macworld event in January 2009.
Asus have also told DigiTimes in Taiwan that will launch dual-core Atom-based netbooks as soon as Intel begins shipping the CPUs. However, Intel has not yet confirmed a date on when this will happen.
In addition to touch panel and dual-core Atom-based Eee PCs, president, Jerry Shen, revealed that the company will also release a model priced less than $400 during 2009 Asustek Computer expects to ship 50,000 units of its recently launched Eee PC S101 this month which will contribute around US$35 million toward company revenues. The notebook maker also expects the model’s shipments will continue to increase with launches set in both Europe and Japan later in the month, according to company sources.
The S101 is expected to account for an average of 10% of Asustek’s monthly Eee PC shipments by the end of the year, noted president Jerry Shen, adding that the company will ship 700,000 Eee PCs this month. Worldwide Eee PC shipments for the first three quarters of the year reached 3.4 million units, Shen revealed. Shen also stated that the company has no plans to make Eee PCs with panel sizes over 11-inch.
Asustek will launch two Linux-based S101s over the next three to four weeks, a 32GB version priced at US$699 and a 64GB version priced between US$799-899. The company expects to ship 200,000-300,000 S101s before the end of the year, according to sources at the company.
Additionally, Asustek will launch two further Eee PC models before the end of the year which will be positioned between the S101- and 1000-series.
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