Hello everybody, Marco Chiappetta for HotHardware here. Thanks for stopping by. Back during the consumer electronic show last month, we brought you a first look at the Asus Eee Top All-In-One PC. The Eee Top takes many features and styling queues from Asus’s popular EPC line of netbooks including Intel Atom processors and integrated graphics. The Eee Top however is in a desktop form factor complete with a touch screen. Please save and we go check it out.
The Asus Eee Top you see here is model number ET1602 1B in black with the wired keyboard mouse option. A version white or a version with the wireless keyboard and mouse will also be available. This machine runs Windows XP home edition at a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom and 270 processor with 1 Gig of RAM, a 160 GB hard drive with built-in 802.11 and wireless and a 15.6-inch touch screen using Intel integrated graphics.
The Asus Eee Top keyboard and mouse are both very sleek and stylist but offer limited functionality. The mouse is at basic two-button mouse with scroll wheel. It’s optical, you can see the blue light under there. And the keyboard is very slim with flat key tops reminiscing of apple and Sony’s current designs. As you can see the keyboard itself is very slim. There is a USB port on the right side to put the mouse into and on the left side there’s a little spot to hide the stylist for the touch screen. The right side of the Asus Eee Top is bare but on the left side you see two more USB ports and a built-in memory card reader. The backside of the Asus Eee Top is mostly bare. There is some ventilation holes at the top to help cool the PC and an adjustable metal stands/handle right about in the middle. There’s also a cable guide on that stand. If we zoom in here the bottom though you can see an RJ45 LAN jack for wired Ethernet, four more USB ports, three here and one over here, a connector for the power supply, microphone speaker and headphone inputs and outputs and a—port over here for physically securing the PC.
Asus includes a user’s manual and an LCD cleaning cloth with the Eee Top because the touch screen does tend together finger prints. Support and recovery DVDs are also included with the Eee Top but we should know that you’ll need an external USB optical drive to use this because there isn’t an optical drive built into the machine. There is however a hidden recovery partition should the OS need to be restored. On the front of the Asus Eetop, you can see a built-in webcam right here with holes for the microphone adjacent to it. At the lower left, there is status LED indicators for Wifi or hard drive activity with brightness controls, volume controls for the built in stereo speakers which are right behind this grill here. And you’ve got a power switch then another little switch here for turning the screen on and off so you just want to save some power. There is a blank space at the bottom with a clear piece of plastic and there’s a blue called Cathode that projects light down on the desk.
One of the Asus Eee Tops main features is its 15.6-inch touch screen. It acts basically like the mouse. As you touch the screen, the cursor moves and when you press down, it acts like a click. Here, I’m switching through the easy mode menus which is basically just in a sort of icons for all the applications that come pre-installed on the machine. Here, you can get a feel for performance as I launch the StarOffice word processor, it comes up pretty quick.
Here is a shadow of the Eee Top sitting at the windows desktop, running at its native resolution of 1366x768. You’ll notice on the video that the screen is fairly bright, but what we can't show you is that viewing angles do leave a little something to be desired. You should be sitting right in front of the machine for the best effect. Now, if you click at the lower left, the Asus Eee bar is going to pop out. Again, with an assortment of icons for some of the more popular ups like upper—for the finger writing utility. We’re going to launch the E-cinema application. E-cinema gives users access to music, photos, or video stored on the machine with a nice, easy to use cool looking interface. Here is what it looks like. I’m going to show some photos first. See, performance is pretty good and here is a few shots of probably the coolest cat in the universe, this Bella Zapata—adopt for you.
Let’s move onto some videos. Now, we’ve got two clips on the machine. They’re both of the Terminator II trailer but one is a 1080p version and the other is 720p version. Here is the 720p version first. You’ll notice that the video is nice and smooth and no drop frames. Let’s turn up the speakers to give you a feel for how those sound. So, they sound pretty good.
Let’s move on to the 1080p clip. Now, you’ll see with this one, although it launches okay. It is a little choppy with a few drop frames. The Intel Atom processor and integrated and telegraphics just aren’t quite up just enough for handling a video of this quality but remember this video is at a higher resolution than the Eee Top screen so there may not be a reason to run something like this on here. We also want to show you the Eee Top’s touch screen and action with the Eee memo utility. You launch it right from the E-bar. It comes up with view of the clock, just slide the clock out of the way. You have assortment of little pads at the top, just drag one right one down to the screen. You can write whatever you want either with the stylist or your finger works both ways. Save your note, arrange it on the desktop. And when somebody comes home, they can see it right there and when they’re done, they can trash it. Pretty cool!
And finally, we thought we’d show you the Eee Top browse in the web for connected over 802.11 and wireless connection. Let’s launch internet explorer. Here comes the HotHardware site, renders very quickly, flash ads that are animated okay. Scrolling looks good, maybe not perfectly smooth but it’s not bad. Let’s click for a few pages. Again, definitely not as fast as a high-end desktop machine but it’s not bad. Got to remember this machine is about as powerful as your average netbook, scrolling okay. Let’ click another page and there you have it. That is the Asus Eee Top in action.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this video spotlight of the Asus Eee Top ET1602 All-In-One Touch Screen PC. Once again, this is Marco Chiappetta for HotHardware, thanks for stopping by.
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