Asus Pre-Announces Next-Generation Eee PC with Touchscreen

According to Asus, the Eee PC 900 with a larger display scheduled for release next month isn't part of the second generation of this company's subnotebook line. Instead, that's going to come around the middle of this year, and it will definitely include a touchscreen.

Kevin Lin, the company's VP of sales, told DigiTimes that the next generation Eee PC is going to debut in May or June, and will cost $500.

Although he confirmed the reports that this device will have a touchscreen, Lin didn't give many other specifics about the new hardware, just that it might have a GPS receiver. He didn't address the speculation that this upcoming model will be able to convert into a tablet shape, as many other UMPCs with touchscreens can do.

It's likely that the next generation design will have much in common with the Eee PC 900, which will offer a number of improvements over the current models besides a just larger, higher-resolution screen. These include up to 1 GB of RAM and storage capacity of up to 12 GB.

In addition, like its predecessor it will almost certainly give users a choice between Linux and Microsoft Windows.

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