Asus launches Eee 1004DN netbook with optical drive in Taiwan

The typical netbook is a nice device that will do the majority of what the average computer user needs from a notebook. The big downside to a netbook from a business user standpoint is that they lack an optical drive. If you work in an environment where the preferred way of handing out information and saving data is still a CD or DVD (or you need to install large apps or watch DVDs) a netbook can be a real pain.

Sure you can carry around an external optical drive, but that sort of defeats part of the rationale behind buying a small and portable netbook. Asus showed us the Eee 1004DN a long time ago and the machine had the one things that many netbook users have lamented the lack of since the netbook genre debuted -- an optical drive.



After a long enough wait that those of us with ADHD have forgotten that he 1004DN even existed, Asus has finally launched the netbook in Taiwan. The machine has the aforementioned optical drive, an Atom N280 CPU, 1GB of RAM, 1.8-inch 120GB HDD, fingerprint scanner, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. The only real issue for me is that the 1.8-inch HDD has to be a bottleneck for a class of machines already not known for their performance. Still, there will be some netbook fans that jump all over the machine for its optical drive. The machine sells in Taiwan at €429 ($AUD736) -- no bargain but not a deal breaker either.