With its Eee Top 1602 all-in-one desktop ($600 as of February 12, 2009; available in early March), Asus carries the Eee name over from its popular netbook line to the desktop. And though you won’t want to run Adobe Photoshop on an Eee Top (the machine is based on netbook components, after all), the all-in-one's sleek design and user-friendly touch interface make it a great choice for users seeking a basic but fun desktop system.
With its glossy white chassis and transparent plastics, the Eee Top looks like something Apple would design. Its 15-inch, 1366-by-768-resolution LCD touch screen is small by desktop standards, but it is adequate for most basic tasks (Internet, word processing, light gaming, and the like), and it helps the Eee Top fit into a range of living environments. One of the machine's best design touches is a carrying handle integrated into the Eee Top's angle-adjustable foot, so you can carry it around. Of course, it helps that the Eee Top is light enough and compact enough that toting it around with one hand doesn't require you to have the arm strength of Alex Rodriguez.
Asus includes six USB 2.0 ports on the Eee Top, two of which occupy the left side (along with an SD Card slot) for easy access. One nagging design flaw, however, is the location of the Eee Top's headphone and microphone jacks on the unit's rear. The Eee Top is small enough that you can easily rotate it to get to the jacks, but I wish that Asus had included jacks on the front for easy access.
Another drawback: What you buy is what you get. The Eee Top is a completely closed system, and you can't upgrade the components inside--which you may find frustrating if you want more memory than the unit's included 1GB (plus a 160GB hard drive). In addition, Asus took a page out of Apple's book and omitted any optical drive.
Users who value expandability are clearly not the Eee Top's target audience. Instead, this computer and its components are most suitable for users who want a no-fuss PC to cover the basics, plus a touch screen to simplify performing certain activities.
The Eee Top's signature feature is its display, with touch-screen capabilities. Colors are bright and vibrant, and the screen accepts both finger input and touch input--though not multitouch as the Apple iPhone and Microsoft's Surface do. The Eee Top has a resistive touch screen, whereas multitouch displays use capacitive touch.
To make touch input more practical, Asus bundles the Eee Top with Easy Mode, a software interface/program launcher with large finger-friendly buttons that just ache to be tapped. Asus also throws in a handful of touch-friendly programs, including some games, the bundled Eee Cinema media viewer, and Eee Memo (a sticky notes app). SoftStylus, another piece of software, lets you draw letters directly on the screen or use an on-screen keyboard. I didn't find SoftStylus to be particularly practical, however; using the included keyboard was much easier for me, but SoftStylus is there if you want it.
Asus gives you plenty of apps to get started with, including Opera, Skype, StarSuite 8, and a handful of simple games In general, the Eee Top's touch interface is user-friendly and fun, but some of the bundled utilities are less so. For example, the user interface on the included Touch Tool (a utility containing various touch-screen controls) is so cumbersome that the utility is completely unusable. Luckily, such apps are the exception, not the rule on the Eee Top.
Powered by a 1.6GHz Atom processor and running Windows XP Home, the Eee Top is no world beater. In our PC World Test Center tests, the Eee Top achieved a WorldBench 6 score of 41, which is slow by desktop standards, though better than the average score of 38 that similarly configured netbooks achieve. The ambling pace is no surprise, of course, since the Eee Top uses netbook components. You won't want to run any high-end graphics programs or games on this machine; but for the basics, the Eee Top will get the job done.
The Eee Top also sports some healthy networking features: Gigabit ethernet and 802.11b/g/n wireless. The bundled keyboard and mouse lack certain features (the keyboard has no numerical keypad, for example), but I found them to be usable--and I liked the keyboard's feel and tactile response.
Though you can get more power for your money if you go with a typical desktop PC, the Eee Top's $600 price tag is reasonable in view of the PC's sleek, eye-catching design and friendly interface.
If you're looking for a computer for the kitchen, for your kids, or perhaps for the technophobe in your life, the Eee Top may be just the ticket.