IN THIS DAY in age it seems like companies are relying a little bit too much on social media to get their message out and Asus has announced its Eee PC 1215N on facebook, yet there’s no mention of it on Asus’ website. The latest addition to the Eee PC family features a dual core Atom D525 processor an Nvidia ION 2 graphics which makes this 12-inch “netbook” a rather interesting offering.
The news actually comes via Asus Middle East facebook page rather than from the official Asus facebook page, but the information seems to be legit. We did actually spot the 1215N back at Computex in the Nvidia tent, although at the time it wasn’t clear that it was anything but an ION 2 powered netbook.
The Atom D525 is not a mobile processor and as such it lacks the power saving features of the upcoming dual core mobile N550. The upside is that the D525 is clocked at a rather nippy 1833MHz, well, at least for at Atom processor, while the N550 will be stuck at 1.5GHz. As the D525 features a 13W TDP it will require better cooling than the N550 with an 8.5W TDP. The Intel IGP of the D525 should also be faster than that of the N550, but with switchable graphics, this is really a non-issue in either case.
As this is a 12-inch, well, we’re not sure what to call it, so let’s stick with Eee PC, it gets a 1366×768 panel which means that the HD video decoding of the ION 2 will actually be of some use. There’s also an HDMI port just in case you’d want to hook it up to a bigger screen. Asus has also thrown in USB 3.0 support and the 1215N also comes with 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 3.0. On the hard drive side you’re looking at either 250 or 320GB of space and Asus also added support for charging USB devices from the 1215N, even when it’s switched off.
As much as this is an Atom powered netbook, it’s more like a low-end notebook than any netbook has been so far. This is yet another reason why the netbook is going to the way of the dodo, as the more netbooks become notebooks, the fewer reasons people have to buy what was once the original idea behind the netbook, a cheap, basic, portable computer. The 1215N is likely to cost as much as many entry level notebooks and even some not so entry level considering all the features Asus has kitted it out with, so no, the 1215N isn’t really what we’d call a netbook, but it might prove to be the kind of notebook some people have been waiting for.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
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