Asus to launch £199 Eee PC laptop in UK

Posted at: 10:30am 1st November 2007 by Ben Hardwidge

Tiny PC comes with solid state disk, 256MB of RAM and costs under £200

Asus has announced that its ridiculously low-cost laptop, and challenger to Nicholas Negroponte’s OLPC, the Eee PC, will launch in the UK on 12 November.

The bad news is that it’s not going to cost under £100 in the UK, as we speculated at Computex. The cost of the laptop in the UK will be £219 inc VAT for the 4G model, and £199 inc VAT for the 2G Surf model in the UK.

That said, that’s still an incredible price for a new laptop, especially one that doesn’t look like it came out of the Fisher Price factory in the 1980s. Built for basic Web browsing and simple day-to-day use, the 4G model of the Eee PC weighs just 0.92kg, and comes with 512MB of DDR2 RAM, a 4GB solid state disk, wireless LAN and a 7in screen.

Both models also come with an Intel CPU and chipset, as a part of Intel’s World Ahead scheme. Asus wouldn’t reveal the spec of the CPU inside, as apparently a part of the deal with Intel is that the CPU spec is kept under wraps. However, many sites on the Web claim that it’s a 900MHz chip based on an ultra low voltage (ULV) Celeron-M, with a model number of 353.

Intel’s executive vice present and general manager of sales and marketing, Sean Malony, was enthusiastic about the Eee PC, saying that ‘this delightful little computer is incredibly easy to use but at the same time is packed full of technology.’ Malony also added that ‘we believe that the Eee PC will be significant in bringing computing and Internet access to more and more children and people around the world.’

A major part of the cost saving comes from the operating system, as the Eee PCs come installed with Linux, although Asus claims that they’re compatible with Windows XP as well.