Asus the manufacturer of the Eee PC are now busily trying to capitalise on the massive, and I suspect somewhat unexpected, success of the Eee PC Brand. They have introduced a number of new versions under the brand name.  I blogged about my first impressions of the Eee 900 the first update of the original Eee PC a few days ago, but now I want to look at some of the newest releases from Asus starting in this post with the Asus Eee PC 901.

Asus Eee PC 901

The Eee PC 901 is essentially the Eee PC 900 updated to take advantage of the new Intel Atom CPU. This low power processor improves battery life while maintaining or even improving performance and operating at lower temperatures. This coupled with the better battery and low power requirements of the 20Gb SSD (Solid State Drive - like USB flash drives) means that Asus are claiming up to 8 hours battery life for the Eee 901 which is important for the intended go anywhere vision associated with the Eee.  There are other small changes such as  802.11n WiFi and Bluetooth wireless capability all improving the capability of Eee without taking away what makes it special.

The Eee 901 is available in both a Linux and Windows XP version, the only difference apart from the operating system is that the XP version comes with only a 12GB SSD instead of 20GB, which presumably reflects the additional cost of Windows.

So updated with new features and with a new CPU and better battery, the Eee PC 901 still delivers the small, easy to use, go anywhere spirit which the original embodied. In the next post we will look at the slightly bigger Eee PC 1000.