Eee Box: mini-note meets desktop

When you’re on a good thing, milk it for all it’s worth Asus is seeking to turn the Eee PC from being a one-hit wonder of a mini-notebook into a fully-fledged family of products built around the same recipe of modest hardware and refreshingly different design carrying an appealingly low price tag.

This week sees the local release of the Eee Box B202: a downsized desktop version of the Eee PC model 1000, which swaps the notebook screen and keyboard for a compact bookend-sized chassis.

The rest of the guts remain the same: Intel’s Atom N270 1.6GHz single-core processor, an 80GB hard drive (no solid state option), 1GB of RAM, 802.11n wireless plus a Gigabit LAN port. The Box also sports four USB ports (two at the front and two are the rear) plus a multi-format memory card reader, but an optical drive remains missing from the list.

And as with the Eee PC netbooks, the price is a head-turner: $429 with Windows XP. Mind you, that price gets you only the slim and rather stylish black box on its own. In mid-September Asus will bundle it with a keyboard, mouse and flat-screen monitor as part of a retail package sold through mainstream outlets such as Myer, Harvey Norman, OfficeWorks and Dick Smith Electronics.

Early October will see the arrival of a Linux version running the same Xandros-based OS as its notebook siblings, but Asus has not yet announced the price or if there’s any difference in specification between this and the XP model.

However, despite the shared netbook blueprint, the Eee Box offers a few extra touches. One is the inclusion of Express Gate, the fast-boot pre-Windows environment that’s now baked into all Asus desktop motherboards. Express Gate is a customised version of Splashtop, a lightweight yet fully functional Linux OS which comes with a Firefox-derived Web browser, Pidgin instant messaging, Skype, plus a media player and photo viewer.

The Eee Box also has a little upgrade headroom. The 2.5 inch hard drive is tray-mounted and can easily be accessed through a slot on the bottom of the case, which should make it a doddle to swap out the factory-fitted 5400rpm 80GB Seagate drive for a higher-capacity (and perhaps faster) drive.

However, while only one of the two DIMM slots is filled with RAM (a 1GB stick of 533MHz DDR2) you can’t take the Eee Box past a maximum of 2GB as this is the most memory supported by Intel’s Atom chipset.

Asus wants to see the Eee Box follow in the netbook’s successful footsteps, which means positioning this not as your primary desktop PC but as a second or third PC for the home performing specific tasks. This includes relatively undemanding desktop apps such as Microsoft Office plus Internet-centric applications such as Web browsing, email and VoIP.

The unit’s small size, low noise, minimal power consumption and easy-on-the-eyes design should help boost the device’s appeal in schools, libraries and net cafes, all of which Asus hopes to sign up for bulk buys.

It’s also pushing the Eee Box as a simplified ‘home entertainment hub’ for everything from a digital music jukebox to a streaming media receiver from your main PC or home server, as well as watching Internet-based TV on your large TV screen. However, it remains to be seen how well it’ll perform in this role.

The pre-loaded OS is Windows XP Home, not Windows XP Media Centre Edition, which will cruel some of its living room potential right out of the box. And as you’d expect from a budget-priced system, the video output port is DVI rather than HDMI (Asus also includes a DVI-to-VGA adapter if you intend to mate the Eee Box to a budget PC monitor equipped with only an analogue D-SUB port).

We think this is one area where the Eee Box will find favour more with those who’re willing to tinker, such as upgrading the hard drive and installing a Lunix media centre OS such as Myth TV. Even so, the modest hardware spec – and the Atom platform’s reliance on integrated graphics rather than PCI Express-connected cards – will see it struggle with HDTV.

While it’ll suffer by direct comparison with a ‘true’ desktop PC, there’s no denying the Eee Box has the same compelling appeal and can’t-go-wrong price point as the Eee PC netbook – a product that boosted the overall mobility market rather than stymied traditional notebook sales. Asus is keen to see if the Eee Box can pull off a similar trick.