Review: ASUS Eee Top ET1602: a glimpse of computers to come?

Specification and musings

ASUS lists the Eee Top ET1602's specifications as follows:

Knowing that the underlying chipset and processor combination of Intel's Atom N270 and 945 GSE is identical to what we've seen in numerous netbooks over the past year, we already know what to expect in terms of performance. We'll be taking a quick look at the Eee Top's general performance later in the review, but to find out what you can expect from Intel's 1.6GHz low-power Atom processor, please feel free to refer to our prior analysis.

Looking at the overall specification, it's clear to see that the Eee Top is little more than a netbook housed in a touchscreen-LCD enclosure. The system offers all the familiar netbooks traits, including Windows XP Home edition as its operating system, a 160GB hard-disk drive, 1GB of DDR2 memory, a built-in webcam, built-in wireless and frankly not much else.

As with netbooks, this is a system whose intention is perhaps not to replace a traditional mid-range or low-end desktop. Instead, it intends to live hand-in-hand with an existing system - perhaps as a simple solution to quick web access in other rooms in the home. Ideal in the kitchen, we feel.

Trouble is, priced at £450 (or £400 if you shop around), the system isn't entirely cheap and a more-traditional-but-bulkier desktop such as the Dell Studio offers far-greater performance at a lower cost.

The Eee Top's saving grace, then, needs to be the clean all-in-one design and the attractive touchscreen functionality - sadly, the latter doesn't fare quite as well as we'd hoped...