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Asus unveils £449 touchscreen desktop
Asus has launched a smart-looking touchscreen looking faintly like HP TouchSmart series but with a smaller screen and at a fraction of the price. The Eee Top 1602 packs a PC into 15.6in widescreen monitor, packing a mic and a 1.3megapixel camera for video calls, and costs just £449 in Vat.It runs XP Home on a Atom N270 processor with 1GB Ram, and uses what Asus calls Express Gate technology to boot in a claimed eight seconds.
Also unveiled at the Stuff show in London was a rather eccentric design called the Bamboo, a high-end notebook expressing Asus's "commitment to green principles".
The company points out that the tensile strength of bamboo rivals that of many metals, including steel, and is "possibly the perfect renewable resource" as it regenerates at a rate of up to 60cm a day,There are 11.1in and 12.1in versions, weighing respectively 1.25Kg and 1.57Kg, and using a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo processor with 4GB or Ram. Prices start at £1349 inc Vat.
Tensile strength is a pointless measure for deciding a meterial's suitability for use as a casing for a laptop. Stretching is not the issue in this situation. It is flex resistance and crush resistance that count, and in both cases, bamboo much less suitable than steel or indeed almost all of the plastics typically used for laptop casings. The real strength in this design comes from the glue used for bonding, so MDF would actually be a better (and much cheaper and greener) choice because its anisotropic nature makes it much better at reisting stress from all directions, not just along the grain, as with bamboo. No, a bamboo laptop is simply an expensive marketing gimmick. If you bought one, you would look a prize ninny.
Posted by Theo Potter | November 2, 2008 9:11 AM
This design is a little tongue in cheek and to be fair to Asus I don't think it was implying that the tensile strength was relevant to its function on the notebook. It is, after all, used as a veneer. Bamboo is a remarkable material: I have used it myself and have helped friends make substantial buildings out of it while gallivanting in India. You can do wonderful designs with it, and I suspect that some time it will get to become fashionable here.
Bamboo is commonly used for scaffolding in the East, though the structures do look alarming, and I guess most of the stress is compressive.
Posted by clive akass | November 4, 2008 5:54 PM
I would like to buy a ASUS touch screen desktop PC. What is the closest place from where I can order one?
Posted by Calla Gordon | December 5, 2008 11:05 PM