• 2Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo T5800 Processor
• 320GB Hard Disk Drive
• 3GB DDR2 Memory
• 512MB nVidia GeForce 9300m GS
• 15.4” WXGA (2800×800 pixels) LED screen
• 2x Blu-Ray player
• 802.11n, Bluetooth, HDMI, VGA, eSATA, Line in, Line out, Firewire 400, card reader, 3xUSB, webcam, biometric finger print scanner, air ioniser

Two things really stick out from this roundup, and they have to be the 2x Blu-Ray Player and the Air Ioniser; so let’s look at what these bring to the machine.

Blu-Ray has been around for a couple of years now, and anyone who has a PS3 has been able to play them since they took them out of the box, but until recently Blu-Ray drives in laptops were a commodity only a few could afford (often adding over £300 to the retail price). The N50 sits in the new class of mid spec machines that bring you High Definition entertainment on the move. But there is one big problem with the blu-ray on this machine: the screen is only capable of 720p, not the full fledged 1080p that we have come to expect from new HD televisions. Although this is slightly overcome by the presence of an HDMI port, is does mean you can’t enjoy the full benefits of high definition on the move.

The next is the Air Ioniser, and even I am confused as to its presence on the machine. This is a slight oddity in the computer world, fitting something designed to improve the air quality around the machine. I can only assume that it is designed to improve your work area, but we will wait to see how it stands up to a lecture hall on a hot day. Ah, there is one very special thing I forgot about: this machine uses facial recognition.

Yep, you heard me right, this machine can use facial recognition to log you in to your account. It uses the camera in the top bezel of the screen, and we do have to say that we have had mixed results. Whilst we have had it work, we have more often had it ignore our faces and need us to type in a password or swipe our finger.

But enough of the specs and features of the N50, what I think we all want to know is how it performs in the real world.

If I am to be frank with you, the N50 took what seemed to be an age to boot. At times I thought that it would be a good opportunity to make a cup of tea, whilst waiting for it to boot. It could be that the sample we received was clogged up by lots of other people using it, or it could just be it takes half a lifetime to boot.

Once booted the machine is quite nippy, loading applications with respectable speed. Making the use of it as a primary machine more bearable. However, this quickness was hindered at times by the touch sensitive controls, which would sometimes require 3 or 4 presses to get to work (a pain when trying to mute the music when the phone rings).

Gaming performance with the machine is what I would expect from the spec, it could run mid-specced games (such as Dawn of War 2, Supreme Commander, etc) quite well at medium graphics quality. Although this rules the machine out as a true gaming rig, this is not where it is aimed. More being thrust at the mainstream user, and people who work on the go.

This meaning to its existence can be seen in the battery life stats, with the N50 being able to last just over 3 hours on battery power. For a machine like this, this is brilliant, as it makes it useable on a long train journey, during a lecture, or even in a car. Mix this with the blu-ray drive and you have a good candidate for a machine that will keep you entertained when travelling, or away from the mains.

Unfortunately, we were unable to benchmark the machine, as we spent far too much time trying out the facial recognition if we are honest. So these figures are not here for this machine, but we are quite willing to tell you that they can be seen over here at Register Hardware.

In conclusion, the N50 represents the main stream branch of ASUS’s notebook computers. IT brings you the sort of spec and speed you expect for this price, with the added bonus of a Blu-ray drive and Air ioniser (if it is a bonus). Although this is hindered at times by long boot times, and unresponsive touch controls. It leads to a good all round machine that will be perfect for those who need to work on the go.

All in all, bitcolumns give the Asus N50 a score of 3/5.

Well. The N10 “netbook” from Asus.

If history has taught us anything over the thousands of years besides you should never accept a giant wooden horse for a gift or remake a horror film more than once, it’s that making something completely pointless is still pointless even if the said thing is good. Things like the ‘charge while you play’ adapters for the wireless xbox 360 controllers, yes lets take a wireless device and give it a wire to make use of… well yes you get my point. Stupid.

The point I’m getting at is the whole “netbook” idea in general. I see no real need for them; they are a needlessly small version of a normal laptop which runs Vista more slowly than the average laptop anyway (or PC since Vista is a POS!). I awoke to the delivering of the N10 one morning with the hope of being able to try some games on it. While this was possible, it was somewhat undesirable. I played through the first couple of levels of Condemned criminal origins on medium settings and the laptop chugged along reasonably well, but fell flat on its face when the screen had more than 1 character on it; which sadly meant 90% of the game. At this point I got bored and passed the N10 to my loving girlfriend who proceeded to play through Indigo Prophecy on it in ONE SITTING. Anyone who says girls don’t game, you are wrong.

On to the main features of the netbook, the overall look is nice. It has a stylish, neat and tidy exterior and some sexy looking blue lights which contrast the black interior keyboard + screen very nicely. Brownie points here Asus, your designer knows what he’s doing. As for features, there’s a TON of software included with the N10. Mostly though, it’s stuff that the average person would never ever use such as fingerprint recognition (seriously). All of which just seem to make Vista run even slower than normal. (more than 3 minutes to startup and be on the desktop without the egg timer icon.) The processor inside is somewhat underpowered for everything that is going on. Windows Vista sucks the life from the poor old 1.60GHz cpu like a gigahertz vampire.

There really isn’t much to say about the N10. It’s a small, underpowered netbook with a heck of a lot of pointless software included, that would have benefitted a lot more from running XP. The half-decent graphics card included is a good idea, but falls short because the rest of the specs are low-end. And for the price of around £500 you may aswel save a few more 0’s and get a macbook or a proper gaming laptop.

Join us next week for: The Rock eXtreme 780 exclusive look, flash on the iPhone, and the $10 indian ‘laptop’.

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The Eee Box specifications:

1.6 GHZ Intel Atom Processor N270
Windows XP Home Operating System
Intel Chipset Motherboard
WLAN WiFi 802.11b/g/n and 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet
1GB DDR2 RAM
WLAN: 802.11 b/g/n
80GB or 160GB HDD (Hard Drive)
SD/SDHC/MS/MS Pro Storage Slots
DVI-Out/USB×4 (2 in front, 2 in rear) (Input/Output)
223×178×26 mm (Dimensions without stand)
Comes complete with ASUS wired mouse and keyboard
N.B. This system does not come with an optical drive (CD or DVD reader/writer) and an external one must be bought separately if needed.

The Eee Box will retail at around £200. BitColumns best price offer has so far been found at http://www.ebuyer.com/product/148886 for the Black Eee Box, and http://www.ebuyer.com/product/149899 for the White Eee Box.

The Eee Box is an innovative little desktop system. It’s mostly been created for the light PC user, someone who won’t intensively use their desktop system or doesn’t need to do anything intensive with their desktop. It itself is very small, about the size of 2 DVD cases stacked next to each other. This for a desktop PC is astonishing. It is also whisper quiet in operation. You would struggle to hear it even while using it to its maximum potential, despite this fact it doesn’t get very warm either.

The looks: It’s visually very appealing. Our particular test model was the black version which looked very nice and would fit well into any room in the house while looking stylish. The stand that attaches to the bottom of the Eee Box also has a designer look to it, and perhaps even makes the Eee Box look a little bit like a piece of art, but that’s a matter of opinion. Other than this the Eee Box is very minimalistic in looks. It’s just the box, a stylish stand and the WLAN aerial at the back. On the front is the on button, illuminated blue, and a front panel. This panel folds out to reveal the on button, the reset button, the HDD activity light, 2 USB ports and the card reader. The card reader takes a range of formats including SD/SDHC/MS/MS Pro so can be useful for permanent or temporary storage. And another last nifty little feature is that if you don’t want the Eee Box to be seen (and I don’t know why you wouldn’t, it looks quite cool) is that it comes complete with an attachment so that it can be attached to the back of a TV or monitor thus turning your TV or monitor into an all-in-one PC. And with the Eee Box being so small and light it becomes essentially invisible and can easily be taken with the TV wherever it goes.

What’s inside: Inside the processor is the same as the processor from the Eee PC 901, saying that it is a very good processor, it handles running programs, games, and the OS very well. The 1GB of RAM is also plenty of memory to keep the system running smoothly and efficiently. The Hard Drive at 80GB or 160GB is plenty of room for a home PC, for a light user. In any case the 160 GB hard drive is sufficient enough for any user. In any case 16GB SD cards are becoming very cheap nowadays and to buy and insert one into your machine as extra permanent data wouldn’t be very expensive. The wireless aerial isn’t too noticeable and is very good. It provides very good wireless connection, found in our testing, and finds connections, connects to them and stays connected very well. Some of the best wireless connections I’ve seen in a while. 4 USB ports is sufficient enough, 1 for a keyboard, 1 for a mouse and 2 others left for other USB devices, such as a printer or a USB flash drive etc. By now everyone should know what Windows XP is like, and it runs very nicely on this machine, having no problems at all. Having said that though any distribution of Linux would have run very much better and would’ve used the resources much more efficiently, which is why I favour the Eee PC with the Linux on. Also if it had Linux on instead the price would probably be less as ASUS would not have to pay for the Software License for Microsoft’s Windows XP (compare the prices of the Eee PC with Windows XP to those with Linux on). Having said that…

The Express Gate: The Eee Box features a feature called the Express Gate. This is where the Eee Box boots in 7 seconds (that’s right 7 seconds!) to a splash screen where the user can then access a few basic features very quickly, such as web browser, instant messenger client and some others. This will then load the user into a VERY basic Linux operating system which has the basic features such as web browser, messaging client, system options etc. available, if the suer just wants to use these basic features. However if the suer wants a word processor or any other features they must then go to boot to OS in the options menu. This Linux operating system is very basic keep in mind. Very basic options are available. It is quite easy to use, because it is so basic, however we did have problems with the wireless configuration to begin with, though these were eventually solved. It works quite well, but as we said it’s very simple so very hard to flaw. Windows can then be booted from here without having to restart the PC and can be found under the options menu.

Performance: We ran a few tests on the Eee Box to test the performance of it and we can say it performs quite well. The hardware inside isn’t top specced hardware, as can be seen from the price, however it is sufficient and works very well for what it is. It runs the word processor included with the OS (OpenOffice) very well and loads it up quite quickly. This goes for all the OpenOffice software. All other applications such as web browsers, file manager and media players all ran very well on the hardware and the system didn’t struggle with any of it. It even handled running multiple applications quite well for the hardware it was using. We then tested out a well know MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) called Guild Wars. We installed this on the system and ran it with minimum graphics. The game worked perfectly. SO we decided to up-step the graphics, it ran fine. Eventually we ran the game at top graphical mode, with the shadows and shaders turned down as they take up a lot of system resources and the game was working very well at high graphics mode (with the shadows and shaders turned down) with minimal (if any) lag. So the graphics and performance of this system are very adequate for playing mid-level PC games. We at bitcolumns were very impressed by these results.

So in conclusion we thought the Eee Box is a bargain! A very good catch for the money you pay for it. Only £200 for a very small, stylish, whisper-quiet and all-rounder PC that can be used for any day to day task and, as we found out from our tests, can play some mid-range games very competently. This would be recommended to: those of you who don’t use a desktop very much, for example you use a laptop mostly, and just need one as a base unit, to those of you who are very casual PC users and so don’t want to dish our £500+ for a PC, this is perfect and to parents for a child’s first computer, or for a teenagers computer as they are cheap, good build, small and have a decent specification. Overall another satisfying product from ASUS, cheap, stylish and small but best of all simplistic!

Score: 4.5/5

The most well known of these has to be the Asus EEE PC, with countless versions and promotion of being “Easy to learn, Easy to work, Easy to play”. We recently have had an EEE PC 901 in the office, so let’s see if these claims are lived up to.

First Impressions

First impressions of the EEE PC were very positive. The size of the device lends itself very well to just dropping into a bag and taking it anywhere with you. The device is also very sturdy, seeming as if it could withstand quite a bit of punishment. Unfortunately we are unable to test the true extremes of the device.

The Important Stuff

As with any computer, you guys want specifications. So here they are:

Processor: 1.6Ghz Intel Atom
Memory: 1GB
Screen: 8.9″ Widescreen (1024×600 resolution. Perfect for websites)
Connectivity: Wi-fi, Ethernet, Bluetooth
Keyboard: Standard laptop keyboard (Small keys sometimes cause errors)
Outputs: VGA, Headphones
Inputs: Microphone, Touchpad, SD/MMC Card Port, 1.3mpx camera, 3 USB 2.0 ports
Bonus: Overclocking feature, Voice Recognition (more about that later)

The above features are the same on both variations of the EEE 901, but there are some differences. The most notable difference is in the Operating System (and storage), with one variation using Windows XP (with a 12GB SSD) and the other using Linux (with a 20GB SSD).

The use of a Solid State Drive (SSD) means there are almost no moving parts within the EEE PC. This helps with it’s sturdiness and resistance to damage form moving. The SSD also gives much faster read/write speeds. This allows the device to boot to Linux within 30 seconds of the power button being pressed. For a modern device with single core processor, and ‘only’ 1GB of RAM this is a blistering fast speed.

The EEE PC features an integrated Overclock/Underclock feature. When running on battery the processor is instantly slowed to 800mhz, this reduces power consumption and gives the EEE 901 it’s reported maximum battery life of 6 hours. But with the press of a button the 901 can increase it’s processor speed from 1.6Ghz to 1.8Ghz. This increase may seem small, but can mean a lot on the low demand applications preinstalled on the device. This increase in speed will, unfortunately, decrease battery life.

Next we look at the voice recognition. This technology never got off to a good start, and even now is known for it’s unreliability and hatred of accents. I myself have much difficulty, with a device always wanting to type Hallo instead of Hello. Now it must be said the the EEE PC 901 only uses voice recognition to allow voice control of the devices features, but the feature has been implemented wonderfully. Users can either press F10, or say Computer, followed by the command. Ranging from Calculator to Shutdown, the computer will repeat the command and then run the software. The computer voice has improved brilliantly from the EEE PC 700, to a point where the calculator response no longer sounds like Matt Damon from Team America World Police.

But every device has faults, and the EEE PC is no exception. We must report that we had network problems with our review sample, with the network often cutting out half way through loading a page. The network we use is tested and used regularly by laptops and we have never experienced these problems before.

The second was the keyboard. Unfortunately all the people we could get to test the device were male, so every one of them had a couple of teething problems getting their ‘manly’ fingers used to the smaller than normal keyboard. Asus will soon be releasing the EEE PC 904 HD, which comes with a hard drive and standard sized keyboard. If you would like the look and ease of use of the EEE PC in a bigger package, this may be what you are looking for.

Overall we see the device as a good companion for anyone who needs/wants to electronically record notes in a lecture. The small size, mixed with the ability to run full applications when needed, makes this a brilliant all-round low-end device.

Score: 4.5/5