Asus May Have a Few New Tricks For eBooks

The ereader market is becoming more crowded. Asus, the manufacturer of the successful Eee line of netbooks, announced on Thursday that the company will be entering the ereader market. Jerry Shen, company president for Asus, said that the company is planning to introduce an eBook Reader under its Eee Brand family by year end.It is not alone in going after this market with close competitor MSI is also planning to them. The Eee brand stands for budget-friendly products. Remember these are the team that shock the notebook and low end pc market and have driven up their market share against some big players.

We are reminded of an article we wrote in march this year which we have repeated below. Now that would be exciting if it were to happen!!



Back in 2008 Back in October 2008 ASUS and Intel launched WEPC.com. The sites slogan was you dream it, Asus Builds it, Intel Inside and it was all about getting people to share their ideas on a community designed PC. Now they want people to give them more thoughts on a Multiple Screen and Touch Interface. You can vote, comment and dream in much more detail about the Dream PC.

Last week they had a little poll from; Extend, Projection, Dual, Dual Touch, Modular Displays and tablets. So it’s no surprise the displays won the day. An extendable screen that is tiny when compact but grows when required.

This is how Asus describe the concept:
The dual panel offers a flexible working space in which users can adapt to suit their prevailing usage scenarios, for example adjusting the size of the virtual touchpad and keyboard. Through hand gestures, handwriting recognition, and multitouch, users are presented with a control surface that is both flexible and intuitive. Users can use the dual-panel concept in a myriad of usage scenarios, for example as a conventional notebook with multitouch screens, a virtual keyboard and touchpad; a multimedia hub, in which both dual panels could combine to form a larger display for widescreen entertainment; or an E-book mode in which users can hold the dual panel concept notebook just like they would a conventional book while flipping pages through intuitive gestures or by touch. These concepts aim to bring convenience to the user through technological innovations and user-centric design.

Asus has launched the Eee PC Seashell slimline netbook in London. The 10” LED screen, has a power-efficient Atom N280 processor, 1GB of memory, 160GB hard drive, multi-touch trackpad, Windows XP Home and Microsoft Works. It weighs a mere 1.1kg, and is claimed to run for up to 6 hours. Asus are primed to also launch a number of other EEE related products in the next few weeks.



The 1008HA Seashell is clearly one of a number of Macbook Air and MSI has also announced its ultra-thin X340 and X320 notebooks will be released in the UK at the end of May. These weigh-in at 1.3Kg and measure 330mm x 224mm x 19.8mm. The X340 and X320 both offer widescreen 13.4The disappointment is the price with the X340 predicted to cost around £850 and the X320 and around £650.

Yet another Day and Yes Another Smartphone Entrant

You can add Notebook manufacturer Asus and navigation system manufacturer Garmin to the increasing list of smart phone contenders. It make three we have written about in one week! The only difference is that Asus and Garmin have announced a "strategic alliance" to deploy a line of cobranded mobile phones. Both bring value to the venture; Garmin in its mobile telephony and navigation, Asus, with its impressive ultra-small Eee PC netbook technology.

Garmin originally announced plans for its Nuvifone in 2008, which now is renamed G60 and will be available in the next few months. All the Nuvifone devices will be LBS (location-based services) offering the same true turn-by-turn, voice-prompted navigation features built into Garmin’s devices. Users will also have access to Ciao, a social networking application that serves as a bridge between multiple location-based social networks and integrates them into one device.

The combination of the LBS Sat Nav and notebook technology is both interesting and compelling, as it potentially wipes out the SatNav devices as we know them today and breaks down the barriers between the notebook and the smartphone. The question we ask is what happens to Germain’s existing market and are they descending from the top of a SatNav peak, which has reached its summit, to now climb a far taller peak in search of bigger rewards? Asus on the other hand is in a great position to give the user choice of experiencing the same applications and access on different devices. The Asus question is on how far do smart phones and notebooks go before they morph and if Asus think this may happen then they have taken a bold step.

However, as with all the contenders there is a huge battle ahead in a tight market and the smart phone wars are going to prove to be very interesting indeed.

Digital Changes Driven By Hard Times

In tough times people take different choices and are often more discretionary in their spending. Do you buy a new laptop with full-features, or a basic no frills notebook, such as the Asus EeePC ? The economic reality of hard choices brings with it potential shifts in technology and offers and can also ultimately change consumer behaviour itself.

It seems only a short time since we were being told that ebook readers were affordable devices and we saw laptops replace cheaper desktop furniture, everyone had expensive office software and we were all going broadband and wifi. Ok which would you sacrifice when times get hard; the all singing and dancing latest laptop, the standard but top price software, the broadband connection or the wifi? Sense would suggest that the infrastructure is more valuable that the device and in some cases commodity office applications.

However as prudence plays its hand, do we also now have to question the consumption of media itself? We have seen the disappointing migration to Blu-Ray as the consumer settled for second best. We have seen the significant rise in open source operating systems and applications. Do we now potentially see a shift in media ownership?
We have previously questioned why we need to buy and own all of our music, films, TV shows and build libraries that have to be replaced when the next technology supersedes it. We started with vinyl, then replaced it with cassettes, some with eight track, then CDs and now with digital files. Potentially how many formats of the same music have we bought? The same applied to video, with the infamous Betamax VHS wars, moving onto the DVD and now Blu-Ray. To date, the humble book hasn’t suffered the same repetitive library syndrome, perhaps because the best reader is still the physical book itself but change will happen and with ebook manufacturers and gurus all talking about the number of books that can be stored on a device on automatically sees the usual library writing on the wall.

We can envisage a shift towards cheap devices that can be permanently logged on to rent, or even get free access to commodity applications, use open source software, access content online and avoid the restrictions of DRM and costs of dedicated devices. Why not share our library with the universe, play what we want when we want it at a price we want to pay and importantly achieve all this at a lower price?
Hard times sometimes shake the tree and what follows are different attitudes and choices that were not relevant before.