ASUS N10 hands-on confirms Eee-free status
It's confusing, and sometimes we cry ourselves to sleep at night, but the new ASUS N10 is hardly a netbook, and has earned the right to shed that completely confusing Eee moniker to try and be something more. We got to handle the ultraportable today, and while it's no match for the sexy produced by Lenovo or Sony on this front, it just "feels" like a real laptop... and there's plenty else to love. The LED-backlit 10.2-inch screen is a stunner, even at the paltry 1024 x 600 resolution, and the keyboard is solid and quite usable -- if a little shallow on the action. Otherwise you're looking at just about every spec you could want in a laptop this size, including switchable discrete graphics (a restart is required), nearly 6 hours of battery off of a 6-cell, HDMI out, media card reader, insta-boot Express Gate, and that handy-dandy Atom N270 CPU. Best of all, ASUS is going to be way more aggressive with these prices than previously believed, at $599 for the N10E, which will sport integrated graphics only and a smaller hard drive, and $699 for the full-fledged N10J. They're still working out which version of Windows Vista to ship with, but that J&R pre-order page (currently at $799) is indeed legit. No built-in 3G just yet.
%Gallery-32131%
