Yesterday, an interview between LAPTOP Magazine’s Joanna Stern and Asustek’s CEO Jerry Shen was published, that shed a lot of light on where Asustek sees things now and where they see things going, as well as the plans they have for the Asus Eee PC family.
Among the information – four million Eee PCs have been sold. That’s sold, not shipped, and they plan on selling another million before the end of this year.
Asustek has plans for touch-enabled Eee PCs that will be due sometime in the first part of 2009. They are looking at both convertible (converts between a Tablet PC and a conventional laptop form factor) conventional laptop form factors. They will be running Microsoft Windows 7 when it becomes widely available (Windows 7 is going to have a lot of touch screen enhancements).
Shen mentioned that starting with the third quarter, the 9″ and 10″ Eee PCs are their best sellers, including the 900, 901, 1000, and 1000H. He also discussed where the line is crossed when it comes to notebooks (displays above 10″) and that you probably won’t see any Asus Eee PCs with displays bigger than 10″.
Interestingly enough, Shen claims that they aren’t seeing the cannibalization of low-end laptops that some companies and Intel are seeing – he said it’s helped grow their brand. Acer is counting on this, as is Samsung. He also said there will be Eee PCs introduced in 2009 that start at $250 USD.
Read: LAPTOP Magazine