The traditional IFA laptop announcement came from ASUS, although this year was a little unusual. While these devices pale in comparison to the Zenwatch that was also announced at the same time, the Zenbook UX305 and EeeBook X205 held their own surprises.ASUS’ new Zenbook is a minor upgrade to the one announced at IFA last year, with some new internals. It has a 13.3-inch display capable of a 3200 x 1800 resolution. This comes at the cost of the laptop foregoing a touch capable screen, although that really isn’t much of an issue. Few other details were made known, aside from the Intel Core M processor, 128/256 GB SSD, and 10 hour battery life.
On the other hand, ASUS has brought back the Eee PC brand with another attempt at making a budget laptop. The Eeebook X205 an 11.6-inch Windows device that is meant to retail at US$199. Inside is an Intel Atom T3735 Bay Trail processor, 2GB of RAM, a 1,366 x 768 LED backlit screen, a microSDXC slot and a micro-HDMI socket. As a recent trend, it also packs Flash memory in place of the traditional spinning disk HDD; in this case customers are able to choose between 32GB and 64GB variations.
It also provides 15GB of Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage (for life apparently), with an additional 100GB of OneDrive storage for two years. ASUS is also throwing in 500GB of its own ASUS Webstorage for two years.
There is no news on when these laptops will launch, but ASUS has indicated that the Eeebook X205 will be made available by either the end of Q3 or early Q4 of this year.
