Asus Eee PC X101, ready for preorder!

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Americans: prepare for more debt!

Unlike the unfortunate case of the Ultrabook, Asus can successfully say that the price of the ultraslim and ultracheap Asus X101 netbook will not deviate much from the US$199 they projected. How did they do this? Well, simple, use the cheapest hardware, of course. According to the official Asus X101 website, it will come with this spec,

The X101 is ready for preorder in various websites, however, as it is right now only PCSuperStore can promise a $199 price. The price ranges from $199 to $209, as of now. For Europeans and Asians, unfortunately, Asus is totally skipping Europe and there is no word on the X101 hitting Asia.

The ultracheap, ultraportable and ultraslim netbook will break barriers in these three areas, but it does come with significant compromises. The 8GB SSD, for example, would really make this a poor purchase if you intend to install Windows 7 on it, as it will likely gobble up quite a significant bit of your memory especially if you climb above Windows 7 Starter. Then again, after installing a Windows OS, you won’t be able to do much else unless you put a high capacity SD card in. And then there’s the power – it comes with the lowest powered Atom processor, the N435, which runs at 1.33Ghz. That would pose even more performance-related problems if you intend to play games on it or watch HD videos on it.

However, this is just conjecture, though I suspect it won’t be too far from the truth. Without a sizeable hard disk, it’s hard to think of this as a practical piece of kit. You might, however, be more interested in the souped up version based on the same chasis – the X101h, which will sport a 250gb hard drive and Windows preloaded. Time will tell how useful the X101 if used outside its MeeGo confines.

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