ASUS Eee Slate EP121 looks good

When HP announced that they would come out with their HP Slate I was thrilled. A real PC with a real operating system (Windows 7) in a slate form factor was just right for me. Unfortunately HP screwed up. It was delayed for a long time. It was even rumored that production was cancelled. When the HP Slate finally arrived the hardware was already pretty much obsolete and it was positioned as an enterprise product. It probably will not even be offered outside of the US market.

The idea of a slate form factor PC still interests me a lot. It would be excellent in the evening for just browsing around the news, working with my web-sites, film collection, photo albums etc. while sitting in front of the TV. All cases where I really would not do a huge amount of typing and could do without a physical keyboard. Not to mention that a slate is so “Star Trek-ish” :-).

There’s of course no way I would bring an Apple product (i.e. the iCrap), or Google’s Android OS for that matter, into the house. I could possibly consider a WebOS-based one but I really want a Windows-based system so I can run any of my “standard” software, web browsers (including Flash, yes screw you Steve), Kindle for PC etc. etc. on it.

At the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Vegas, which is happening right now, Asus showed their ASUS Eee Slate EP121 12.1” eSlate PC w/ Windows 7 which looks really interesting. It’s a full Windows slate with a decent Intel i5 CPU, good display resolution (1280×800), 4 Gb of RAM, 64 Gb SSD unit and 2 USB ports. In short a real PC in a slate form factor.

Battery life is not stellar (3+ hours) but I do not care that much since I would almost never use it very far away from a power outlet. Boot time of Windows from the Solid State Drive appears to be less than 20 seconds. Wake up time from sleep about a second. It also has both touch as well a digitizer pen which contrary to what some people claims, is a good thing if you want to use your slate for more than just as a fancy toy (ala iCrap).

If this product comes to Europe and the greedy bloody politicians in Brussels doesn’t make the price explode too much with all their taxes and fees, I guess I can always get it in Switzerland to avoid to feed those vultures, I will look very closely on this one.