We already knew Asus was planning on releasing a new Eee PC, but today Digitimes is reporting on a few more rather important details of the upcoming Eee PC - it will have a touchscreen and possibly GPS support too. (The price is supposed to be $500 with 1GB of RAM and probably around an 8GB SSD.) Apart from this being a cool feature, though, how is this really important?

In the past, the Eee PC has mostly been about the hardware. Yes it is cool that it runs Linux, but there is nothing amazing about the software. Now that there is going to be a touchscreen on the Eee PC, software will be much more important.

If the touchscreen is only used as an alternative mouse, it may well become the kind of feature that gets old after 10 minutes. On the other hand, if Asus creates software the fully takes advantage of the touchscreen, it could make the touchscreen the main selling point of the device. I don’t think Asus will pass up an opportunity like this. Chances are there will be much more attention put into the software in the second generation Eee PC, which is good.

This increased attention to the software could be a way for Linux to stay the main operating system on the Eee PC, not just a secondary choice for geeks, when Windows is added as an option. Because Linux, and most of the applications that run on it, are open-source, Asus can modify them to work really well with the touchscreen, whereas with Windows, Asus will not be able to modify the software as easily. In this way, the Linux version of the Eee PC could have a significant advantage over the Windows version.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 8:50 pm and is filed under Hardware, Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.