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SINGAPORE : Asus' Eee Top is an all-in-one desktop with a difference — a built-in touchscreen with a supposedly attractive price tag (S$999).
Asus has had plenty of success with its Eee netbooks and some of the guts from the portable line has made its way into the Eee Top. The machine was powered by an Intel Atom processor running at 1.6GHz, with 160GB of storage and 1GB of memory. Connectivity comes via built-in WiFi (802.11n) and a gigabit ethernet port. Setup was painless.
If you connect to the Internet wirelessly, you just need to plug in the wired keyboard and mouse and the power adaptor. While I can’t quite say that the Eee Top is beautiful (its blue neon-like lights remind me of an insect killer), its looks are clean and the build quality is good.
The stand that holds up the 15.6-inch widescreen LCD (with a resolution of 1,366x768) is sturdy, yet flexible enough to adjust the viewing angle.
There are six USB ports, built-in speakers, a webcam, a microphone and a memory card reader. But it’s not quite an all-in-one because the Eee Top doesn’t have an internal disc reader or writer.
Despite running Intel’s lower-end, power-efficient Atom processor, the performance of Windows XP was snappy when multi-tasking with a Web browser, a word processor and multimedia playback. We could even run high-def movies at 720p.
The desktop was preloaded with Windows XP and comes with an icon-based interface that makes it easy to launch applications with the touchscreen. Asus has included Sun’s StarSuite collection of software for word processing and other productivity tasks. There’s also a version of the Opera browser customised for touch input.
The responsive touchscreen registers input with your finger or a stylus tucked away under the keyboard. There are a couple of simple touch-enabled games but the playability is limited. Handwriting recognition wasn’t quite accurate enough for crunching out documents with the stylus either.
The operating system isn’t designed for touch input so there will be some frustration while you struggle to tap an onscreen button at the edges of the display.
We found the touchscreen input convenient when we were browsing for music and movies. However, we were also hoping for a remote so we could control the Eee Top across the room.
The Eee Top is great for simple productivity tasks, media playback and surfing the Web, but it’s no gaming or media editing rig. The touchscreen is a novelty and you’ll find that it isn’t quite essential when you’re operating the computer for long - it’s less tedious to use the keyboard and mouse.
But I think it’s a useful and undaunting recreational machine to have for parents or children. I placed it on my kitchen counter top and in no time, my mum - the best test subject I could find - could search for recipes online, listen to music as she cooked or have a video chat with my cousins and aunts overseas. And I could, for once, ask her what she was cooking for dinner via instant messaging. My nephew enjoyed the two touch-enabled games and thanks to the good build quality, I wasn’t worried about him banging his fists on the display.
If Asus could lower the price, simplify the user interface for touch input and include some indispensable touch-enabled applications, the Eee Top could change the playing field for desktops, just like what its portable brethren did for laptops.
- TODAY/il
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