ASUS CES 2009 Highlights

Though this year's CES was unusually quiet in terms of attendance, and even a few exhibitors pulling no-shows, Asus had a plethora of new high tech gadget goodness on display, true to their usual form.

ASUS CES 2009 Highlights Male: All right so we’re here with David Ray, our general marketing manager for Asus. He’ll take us around the booth a little bit. He’ll show us all the good new technology from Asus. How are you doing Dave? David: I’m doing fine today. How are you? Male: Good, thanks for being with us. David: Okay. Well, let me start off by talking about the EPC netbook. Okay everybody knows the EPC netbook. It’s important that you also know what differentiate us. One thing that we’re showing at the show today is that a lot to the new EPCs have all they computed. What that means is that you can get up to 9 and a half hour of battery life in our EPCs. Now the reason that we can do that is because we have a super hybrid engine inside. That’s very simple, we use a very similar thing in our motherboards, video cards and also some of our laptops but it is intelligently regulates power uses so that when that you’re actually using when your applications meet the power its delivered but when they don’t you’re drawing for less power. So 9.5 hours battery life is it’s not something that anybody can touch this on right now. Now one thing I want to highlight was a new member of the EPC family. We’ll be getting the 9-inch version of this probably in March and the 9-inch version is called the T91. Basically what you have is the world’s first netbook that’s also a tablet. This tablet will integrate GPS and you could just take it of your card, type out where you want to go. It’s very stylish. We can't tell it to the camera the built quality is exceptional. Asus products often have quality you can see in the field. So I can get your hands and when I encourage it. Male: Nice. David: It supports for digital TV and the amazing thing about this unit is that the price point will be more less right now range of the other EPC models which are selling for about $299 in our most expensive model of the D690 but a couple of steps below that would be the price of this. We deliver it at an amazing price and a lot of people are going to enjoy this. Male: And the model again on that is? David: The T91 is the 9-inch version that we’ll have in March. This is the 10-inch version that we’ll be getting a little bit like that. Okay our next product is the newest member of the E Family. We’ll probably be shipping it maybe 3 or 4 weeks. It’s called the Etop and what the Etop is it takes the E concept of having something that’s easy to learn, easy to work and easy to play and brings it into a family setting normally. Now this can sit right down on you kitchen table. If you have to go to the work in the morning and say you want to leave a note for your wife, you just put down here, drag one of these and you can say “please buy eggs.” Male: It’s the honey do-list. David: It is the honey do-list. In the morning she’ll see this and everything will be well read. Now that’s just one of the communication features that we have. This is basically an entire computing device like the PC but it’s a much smaller form factor and the price will be in astounding $599 as the target price. Anything that you want to do, you can probably do with this except the maybe hard core gaming just like all of the new products. You can use Skype, there’s a nice webcam in here where you can have conversations with the people across the road at no charge. When you want to have fun, the Etop has a feature called Ecinema and it will give you access to all of your digital content, movies, pictures and everything. Just with the touch of your hand. Now one of the great things about these products is how simple they are. They bring down barriers. If this is your home family computer you can basically but use this even if you’re just a student or first time user. You don’t even have to know how to type well to do a lot of functionality with this. So I want to access my photos and here they come up. All as easy is touching it, in fact they do it all at a touch. Male: Nice. David: When it comes time to do work, it comes with a full squad of applications, database, presentation, drawings, spreadsheets, it’s very versatile, very attractive, it draws only a fraction of the energy of what a normal PC would and it’s super quiet. I believe it’s 28 decibels so it’s about the level we whisper. It look great on you customer’s kitchen things. Male: Nice Etop, good stuff and what’s this one all about Dave? Dave: Okay the S121 is an elegant in ground breaking notebook. Its ground breaking because as you can see here it has up to 512 solid states dry. So, it’s far more capacity than you’ve seen off to this point. It also has 8 hours of battery life because of the successive the integrated super hybrid engine. In a 12.1-inch form factor, you get just a beautiful laptop with genuine leather, cream colored contrast. You have swarovski crystal in each of the answer and look at the profile it’s just a very beautiful notebook. Male: They are nice and thin. David: It’s kind of a hybrid because it runs on Atom processor that means that it’s also using less energy and that also accounts for the incredible battery that I think can get from it. Male: Atom Z520? David: Yap it’s a Z520. Male: Very nice, the S121. So we are here now with the Brian Jang and Peter Clark from Asus. Guys are going to tell us about WePC program and how readers and I guess the folks out there in the community can contribute to some designed concepts right? What’s that all about guys? Brian: So we all know CS and Intel are pretty WePC.com. It’s a place where user can come to submit the ideas, image and the inspiration of their ideal PC. Now this designs feature ideas come here and feedback, it’s going to be evaluated by Asus and can actually be a blue print. Whit actual netbook, no places with Intel inside. Some of the core ideas right now are waterproof notebooks, dual touch screens, future proof notebooks, C pluses something like that. We have special force to express these concepts by using our visual. You could draw your concept. You can share your ideas in our community. You can join discussion with our authors. WePC bloggers and you can also get the latest news and innovation with WePC TV. This computer Clark, He’s our concept designer from Asus headquarters. Peter: As we mentioned that WePC is our program to get uses ideas about how they would like a notebooks to be in the future. So its great for us to get input at the very early stage to previously see what is important to use it because from our office we don’t always get to everybody so its great that kind of input and its great all this features and ideas. Now the challenge for us strangely is to find the most powerful features in this time. Implement them into where we use the --so we’re going to take these ideas and find taking one from the next level. So this can become a commercial product. But in the end, this product is going to be something that is designed by this is got input from the user’s set up. This is going to be something that they did like. Male: Nice and do you have some concept products over here? Peter: Yeah so this is showing the kind of concept product that we’ve create in our designed team. Actually its funny some of the ideas that WePC form is brought to our intention of some ideas that we’ve been thinking about too. So I think its going to be some good synergy than so we’ve joined board, hopefully we can take this ideas and then had to introduce them into our advance concepts so hopefully the uses of WePC form can look to and show us in the future in our advance concepts and see some of their own ideas in the future. Male: And what’s the fold unfold the concept is pretty interesting little thing here. Peter: Well the fold unfolds concept starts now is an idea to look into the future of notebook that between we’ve been looking into the future and in the time seem about 3 to 5 years in the future. And what we are thinking about is simplifying the computer. Making it easy to use, making it lighter. Always kind of things that we think will make our computers better in the future. On this side you have the unfold concept which is all about user experience. This is about a notebook that can fold into different positions which will allow the users to transfer information wirelessly between users. And this configuration is called the flat sharing mode so… Male: Oh nice. Peter: You can now pass files between each other. So it allows people to work in a more human way. We think that’s very important in design so where with WePC we’re taking the users ideas. We will always test to make up for its more use friendly more human.