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Technology news and Jobs 
Fuzzy Logic ASUS Eee Box gets unboxed in Australia at last!
Fuzzy Logic ASUS Eee Box gets unboxed in Australia at last! | ASUS Eee Box gets unboxed in Australia at last! |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Wednesday, 13 August 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 3 Being “green” is of great importance to the world today, and green technologies are becoming ever more popular, not just for lower power consumption. This also means power consumption is reduced by “up to” 90% compared with regular desktop computers. It also features “Green Design” as it’s made with “earth-friendly materials for reduced CO2 emissions; and conforms to stringent Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) and Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) standards.” And as explained on the first page, you can expect Asus to heavily promote this box as a multifunction, multimedia wonder. The marketing will explain that the Eee Box is “designed for prolific emailers, avid web surfers and dedicated Voice over IP (VoIP) users, get comfortable in the box seat and enjoy the exciting novelties the Eee Box has to offer.” You can “read and respond to mailbox matter, make it your own personal jukebox streaming music as well as pictures and video from a media centre or home server, or become a chatterbox and shoot the breeze with friends via VoIP.” And as previously noted, IPTV usage is another factor Asus believes consumers will readily take advantage of, as “the Eee Box is also the perfect choice for enjoying Internet Protocol Television (IPTV), with thousands of programs are freely available on the web, allowing users to personalise and watch a roll of TV shows with ease.” Clearly, users wanting to watch TV shows via Joost or other IPTV solutions will need to ensure their broadband plan offers plenty of gigabytes of download, although given that there are ISPs out there offering a monthly download limit of 150GB for AUD $69.95 per month, this isn’t too difficult – as long as you live in an area that has plenty of ISPs to choose from. Given that the system is running Windows XP, and not the more security friendly Xandros Linux, users will need to install their own Internet security packages. Options go from fully fledged Internet Security suites to free programs such as AVG Anti-Virus, ZoneAlarm’s free firewall and Spybot Search and Destroy 1.6 for anti-malware. However there’s also the upcoming Norton Internet Security 2009 software, currently in pre-release beta. I’ll be writing a full story about this very soon, with Symantec making the astounding promise of “zero performance impact”, reversing the previous trend to bloatware that slowed down computers. So far, the beta version has been working incredibly well on my standard notebook computer (actually a Core Duo Tablet PC) and I haven’t noticed any performance impacts at all. Norton says the software will be fantastic especially for those with “older” computers, so Norton Internet Security 2009 could be an ideal companion to the Intel Atom equipped Asus Eee Box, and it’s something I’ll certainly be testing out when I get a review model of the Eee Box to try for myself, although I’ll be testing it with the free security programs I listed above. Finally: I’m sure savvy consumers can build their own cheap “white box” desktop computers from their local computer store at a similar-ish price point. But as with the Asus Eee PC notebook computers, the tiny size and all those power saving features make the Eee range really stand out. Therefore it’s easy to predict not only great success for the Eee Box, but it’s also easy to predict competitors getting ready to copy the Eee Box, too. The low cost PC revolution is here!
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