Awesome Thingy of the Day: Jul 14, 2007

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In a giant leap forward for mankind, Asus has come up with a laptop that will sell for a measly $189. Dubbed the "3ePC", it is able to find it's way into that price range by taking advantage of hardware that is not necessarily "bleeding edge", yet is still highly capable. For a little context, it was just six years ago when we were all dying for AMD or Intel to break the 1 GHz processor barrier, and when they finally did it seemed like we couldn't imagine what we were going to do with all that power! Now we find ourselves in a world talking about computers with 8 processing cores and I'm beginning to wonder the same thing all over again - "What is the average user going to do with all that power?" I surfed the web just fine on that 1 GHz computer (actually a blazing 950 MHz AMD Thunderbird, to be exact!) and I have a feeling I'll still be able to do it just fine, even with the lowliest of today's new computers. And that's where I believe this laptop will really shine - as a simple check-your-email-and-surf-the-web kind of machine.

Another reason the 3ePC is able to sell for so little is that there is no internal hard drive installed. This would leave you the option of getting yourself an inexpensive external hard drive (usually well under $100), or you could rely on the included 2 GB solid state drive. In that scenario it would make sense to take advantage of the blooming online storage industry as a repository for all of your other storage needs. Popular services such as Box.net, XDrive or Amazon's S3 offer well-known and reliable storage solutions, and lesser-known services like UploadingIt or Filefront let you leave your files there at no charge, and in the case of Filefront, with no space limits. Taking advantage of these sites while using a simple solid state drive in the laptop is a nice way to keep the cost low while giving yourself a place to put the files you collect while browsing. Sure, it's not going to appeal to every user, but they are certainly going to attract a lot of us who admit that they just don't need all that speed to do simple tasks.

There's also those (me included) who like to have their cake and eat it, too. In that case, the Asus 3ePC is simply a specific tool for a specific job, not a swiss army knife. When I want to surf the web with portability but need a larger screen than a smart phone can offer, it's tough to beat $189 for the price/performance ratio the Asus offers. And for those times when I really do need to "tear it up", I just go home and sit in front of my multi-core desktop machine. Sure, it's not very efficient, portable, or cheap, but it can do everything that that little laptop can't.

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