The latest new notebook from ASUS was a cool surprise, as without much ado, the company chose to ship it with Ubuntu 12.04, the latest version of Ubuntu open source software as the Operating System, instead of a conventional paid software such as Microsoft.
The news about this new Asus gets even better as it will ship with the latest of Intel’s ATOM series, processor, the cool and sophisticated Cedar-trail and is officially the EeePC 1225C, running on Ubuntu 12.04.
Post June 2011, when the first announcements were made about ASUS running on Linux on their EeePC series- a VP of Canonical’s OEM services had said that,“The move will ‘put Ubuntu in the hands of a larger audience’ he says, ‘people who would not necessarily download Ubuntu, but would be happy to buy a computer knowing that it will work perfectly on that hardware.’ We expect the slim form factor and great design of Eee PC, combined with the great performance delivered with Ubuntu, to produce a real performer in the marketplace.”
The first series of Ubuntu-based EeeP had Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) as well as Adobe Flash, but were largely available in Europe. MeeGo Linux last year on EeePC x101 was another in this series.
Hardware specs of the new notebook:
The Asus Eee PC 1225C a11.6 inch, 1366 x 768 pixel screen display; you can choice from an Atom N2600 or the N2800 CPU, And will have only 2GB of memory as well as a 500GB of hard disk space.
This notebook has 3 USB ports a’SDHC card reader, 802.11n WiFi, Blueooth 3.0, and a 0.3MP camera. 3 and 6 cell battery options are available, with up to 9 hours of battery life.’
The notebook is already available across US but is at a steep $422 as at Amazon.com.
However, this latest model by Asus is poised to see which way the notebook market will go. Previously in 2007 when the first range of netbooks appeared with Linux OS, positioned against Windows, Microsoft immediately countered these with severely discounted versions of its Windows XP as well as Windows 7 PC licenses in the past couple of years.
As of the current trends, there has been no other netbook with an Intel Atom inside it, since 2009 that has not come preloaded with MS Windows. Therefore, Asus latest netbook will open out the market and drive prices down in 2012 as well for Window 8 for all 10 to 11.6 inch Intel’s computers. This could eventually become a war of prices as the price difference between a netbook and a higher-function laptop are almost the same.
Therefore, Asus first step to use Ubutu 12.04 is noted as being a much a decider in the 11.6 to 10-inch market segment. This is because higher-adoption of Linux-based notebooks could eventually allow competing OEMs also to offer the Free OS software, bearing down again on Windows to lower their license fee.
This is an area one will have to watch with interest.
