Asus To Simplify Eee Product Line

After a year that saw Asus serve up almost two dozen Eee variants - and sell 4.9 million of them - the company now plans to simplify its Eee offerings.

Taiwanese computer maker Asus announced at an investor’s conference in Taipei this week that it managed to sell 4.9 million Eee PCs during 2008, a figure just short of its stated goal of selling 5 million units. Asus CEO Jerry Shen blames the near-miss on a sudden downturn in consumer spending at the end of the year as the world economy slowed down. But Asus also says it has a new strategy for 2008: after pumping out more than 20 Eee models during 2008—often just minor variations with cutsey names, but some with significant differences—the company says it plans to simplify its Eee offering in a bid to avoid consumer confusion.

The new strategy is no doubt a response to rival Acer. Although Asus more-or-less defined the netbook PC with its Eee line, Acer is expected to announce 2008 sales figures for its Aspire One netbook that exceed Asus’s sales by a million units or more. In contrast to Asus’s plethora of models, Acer offered only one and launched it to global markets: the move avoided customer confusion, leveraged economies of scale, and kept design and manufacturing costs down.

At the same time, Asus has announced it is now taking pre-orders for its Eee PC 1000HE, the first netbook to feature Intel’s Atom N280 processor. The unit also features a high-density batter that the company claims can power the notebook for up to 9.5 hours; the system also ships with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless networking, a 160 GB hard drive (plus 10 GB of online storage). The Eee PC 1000HE will carry a suggested price of $399; pre-orders are available through Asus’s official Eee PC Group on Facebook.