UK Netbook Review

The latest Asus Zenbook UX31 has the ability to resume from sleep nearly instantly and now Asus is bringing the same feature to its Intel Atom-powered netbooks. The feature is available on the latest Eee PC 1025C and 1025CE and also adds a new sleep mode that allows an Eee PC netbook to resume from sleep in just 3 seconds. Asus says you should also get about 21 days of sleep time while using Instant On, so the sleep mode isn’t exactly a battery killer.

One of the first Asus netbooks to ship with an Intel Atom N2600 Cedar Trail processor is now available for purchase in the US. The Eee PC X101CH comes with a 10.1 inch display, 1GB of memory, a 320GB hard drive. With a price tag of $280 or less, it’s also firmly in the budget end of the Asus lineup.

Asus has a new ultra portable coming out soon that should fit in nicely between their current Eee PC netbook and Zenbook offerings. Called the Asus U24E, it features a 1366 x 768 pixel display, An Intel Core i5-2430M processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 750GB hard drive. It will weigh 3.3 pounds and will likely be priced much less than the Asus Zenbook UX21.

Asus has released its financial results for the third quarter of 2011, and not only did they beat forecast for net profits, they also revealed some interesting figures about product shipments. Asus shipped 1.3 million Eee PC netbooks in Q3, bringing the total for the year so far to 3.6 million. During the same period, Asus shipped 800,000 Eee Pad tablets. So, despite the fact that tablets grab more headlines than netbooks these days, that doesn’t mean netbooks aren’t still shipping in high numbers.

ASUS chairman Jonney Shih was just interviewed by Walt Mossberg at AsiaD. On the topic of netbooks, Shih notes that rather than being buried, netbooks are simply “evolving.” Even more importantly, however, whe confirmed that a new ASUS netbook is en route: “You’ll see on our new netbook, it’ll be very thin.” In fact, he even suggested that the design may follow that of the Zenbook, but just… smaller.