It’s hard to believe the ASUS Eee PC is only a year old especially when you consider the netbook that spawned a new genre in mobile computing has sold around 4 million units to date. Asus are reportedly hoping to push this figure to 5 million by the end of 2008. Jerry Shen, CEO of Asus, doesn’t appear to be too worried about competition from the likes of Samsung, Lenovo and Dell and who can disagree with him? Every time we think the netbook market is getting jaded Asus launches an even more exciting device such as the Asus Eee PC 101.

Probably the biggest news on the Asus horizon is the launch of a touchscreen Eee PC. This netbook is expected to be with us early 2009 but Shen wasn’t prepared to give away too much information. Another noteworthy statement is that Asus will never ship their netbooks running Microsoft Vista. Shen stated that Asus will continue to ship Linux and Windows XP devices moving to Windows 7 sometime in 2009 - good to see Asus keeping the memory hog at bay!

Interestingly, it would appear that Asus has no ambition to go large just yet so it appears that 10″ screens will be the largest netbook to ship. Shen believes that by putting bigger screens on these devices they’ll then slip into the notebook market which Asus is keen not to do.

Unfortunately, Asus don’t really seemed to have pushed the EeeBox - the low cost desktop. The target figure for sales has only been a few hundred thousand units. Expect Asus to start eating into that market once the Eee PC dominates.

Asus has been blazing a trail for some time now. The key to their success has been low prices with reasonable performance. Until competing vendors can match these offerings expect Asus to stay on top.

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