I am surprised to see that the Windows Experience and 3DMark scores are essentially the same as my Acer nettop. The Windows Experience rating I received was a 3.3 with the 3DMark03 score being somewhere in that range, I would have to look back at my tests.
Just goes to show that the newer hardware isn't more powerful but rather more power efficient. I just hope that Asus can squeeze 8 or more hours out of this thing as their previous Atom 330 + Atom equipped 12" netbook would only get about 4.5-5 hours of real world usage.
The inclusion of USB 3.0 is a real plus though and eliminates the need for eSATA (which I thought was fast enough at 3Gbps). I wonder if this is standard USB 3.0 (which is 3Gbps) or if it the "high speed" edition which operates at 5Gbps. Either way, it is nice to see that in a netbook. The two ports mean that at least two true high speed (sorry, I hate the 480Mbps peak speed of USB 2.0 when dealing with 500GB+ of data) external hard drives or quite possibly one high speed hard drive and an external Blu-ray drive (though USB 2.0's bandwidth is more than capable of handling that up to 48X read and write speeds).
I wonder when Asus is going to officially unveil this product so that we can get a release date and price. I have a feeling that this is going to come it at around $500 given the "new" Atom processor, "new" ION 2 (netbooks with the standard ION platform are still expensive), and USB 3.0. All of this "new" (though USB 3.0 really is new) technology comes at a price. Kinda makes the updated standard MacBook at $999 look tempting with its 10 hour battery all while having the same exact features as the $1199 MacBook Pro.
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