We haven’t talked a lot here on GadgetRoad about netbooks lately, but we have a novelty: the cheap ASUS X101CH EEE PC, a 10 inch netbook with the new Cedar Trail Atom platform from Intel. The preview has made my our friends from NetbookLive.com.
This is the successor to the this years’s X101H, and will arrive on market in February 2012, so until then you have to rely on previews like this, that take into account a 99% final version of the product you’ll actually going to buy next year.
Let’s begin with the construction, which doesn’t follow the seashell design of the old ASUS netbooks, but rather goes for a slightly rounded design, with a matte case featuring a nice texture that doesn’t catches smudges, fingerprints and seems harder to scratch also.
Asus X101CH netbookThe ASUS X101CH is not as thin as an ultrabook, but that’s not a problem, since weight is kept down very low thanks to the 10 inch form factor. The screen bezel and the display itself seem to be matte, which is great, considering most laptops and netbooks these days feature those dreadful gloosy screens that double as personal mirrors.
Stepping on the components, the center piece is the new dual-core Atom Cedar Trail processor, the N2600 clocked at 1.6 GHz, helped by 1GB RAM and a 320 GB mechanical hard drive. The OS is Windows 7 Starter and power comes from a 3-cell 28 Whr battery, which won’t impress you with autonomy figures, but the X101CH EEE PC is meant as a value product, not a high end netbook, if such thing even exists.
Simple yet effective design for Asus X101CH netbookThe ASUS X101CH EEE PC netbook features a HDMI out port, which means outputting HD video to a big screen TV is not out of the question. And as you’ll see in the video below, the 10 inch X101CH is a good performer when decoding 720p content, while 1080p videos are a little bit sluggish, but still watch-able. For now I’ll wait for more articles on Netbooklive and I’ll make sure to update this post once the complete specs and tests come alive.
Let’s end with the 15 minutes long video unboxing and preview of the ASUS X101CH netbook: