Asus Eee Top ET1602
At first glance, ASUS’ Eee Top ET1602 is the epitome of a niche product. Packing nettop-spec hardware in an all-in-one form factor, with a touchscreen and general design that seem to have stopped by HP’s TouchSmart and the Apple iMac along the way, it’s certainly tough to pin down.
In the box, ASUS include a wired keyboard and mouse, stylus and a printed manual, together with recovery DVDs and a microfiber screen cleaning cloth. Two color versions of the Eee Top are available, white and black, with otherwise identical hardware specs.
First impressions are positive. Despite the relatively budget price for the Eee Top, ASUS have managed to eke out more than a little style from its plastic casing. Held upright by a strong, spring-loaded metal leg, the body of the Eee Top is white gloss-finish plastic sitting in a transparent tray. Stand (and carry handle) aside, the nettop is just 4cm thick; along the back run gigabit ethernet, four USB 2.0, power, microphone, line-in and headphone ports, plus a Kensington lock hole. On the left-hand side there are a further two USB 2.0 ports, plus a multiformat memory card reader.
Keep Reading after the break and see the video.
Underneath the touchscreen there are buttons for brightness and volume on the left, while the power and screen toggle are on the right. LEDs indicate WiFi and hard-drive activity, and in the bottom bezel there are stereo speakers. A webcam and microphone are at the top above the screen. The Eee Top has vents running across the top and in the center on the back.
Using the included peripherals and a WiFi internet connection, you can reduce cabling to just two wires: power and one USB for the keyboard. The mouse, not entirely necessary if you’re devoted to the touchscreen, can plug into a USB port on the keyboard; on the opposite side there’s a pop-out stylus in a spring-loaded bay. ASUS’ keyboard is surprisingly weighty and pleasant to type on. It follows the same isolated keys as first seen on some Sony laptops, and although lacking a separate numeric keypad the rest of the keys are full-sized. Several have Fn-triggered secondary features, including volume and music control, backlighting, sleep and WiFi, launching the webcam app, toggling through performance modes (more on that later) and changing the Eee Top’s blue underlighting.
The mouse is less impressive, a lightweight blue LED model with scroll-wheel. It’s usable, and the design echoes the white & transparent plastic of the Eee Top’s build, but nothing special. As for the stylus, it’s a basic 14cm stick of plastic with a tapered nib; the only thing worth noting is the strength of the bay spring, which is enough to launch the pen across the desk.
Despite looking a whole lot more grown up than any netbook (and taking up more of your workspace), the guts of the Eee Top are in fact on a par with any of the company’s more recent budget ultraportables. That means a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 processor, 1GB of RAM and a 160GB hard-drive. WiFi is b/g/n, but the graphics still use Intel’s GMA 950 onboard chipset and there’s no optical drive. Of course the primary difference is the 15.6-inch touchscreen display, running at 1366 x 768 resolution.
In the end, though, we’re surprisingly impressed by the Eee Top. The display may be relatively small compared to what many people have on their desktop nowadays, but given you need to be sitting within comfortable prodding distance it’s less of an issue. It also makes the Eee Top more portable; toting it between rooms is no hardship, and the next-generation model, tipped to have an internal battery, should make that even more straightforward. Even sucking up your mains power, its frugal 27W demands mean the Eee Top is more economical than a standard desktop PC.
Similarly, as long as you’re not looking for high graphics performance, the Eee Top handles web browsing, office chores and media playback with little complaint. ASUS, incidentally, are planning a separate ATI Radeon HD 3450 video option in the next-gen machine. The touchscreen implementation may not be perfect, but it’s certainly usable and the price is far less than HP would ask for a TouchSmart PC. For the same cost as the Eee Top you could obviously find a higher-spec standard desktop PC, but the ASUS’ design charms, touchscreen and general usability still make it a tempting buy.
