Another week has come and gone leaving us with memories and a hoard of cool stories to throw your way for weekend reading in case you missed them over the week. An Asus 900HA netbook was hacked into a touchscreen slate on Monday and we really liked it. DIY gear is so cool, especially when it turns out this good. Monday also brought some details on the Blackberry Storm 2 piezo touchscreen tech. We really hope its better than the original Storm.
We’ve a soft-spot for DIY netbook tablet PC conversions here at SlashGear, so it’s always nice to see a user turn their budget notebook into something a whole lot more interesting. EeeUser forum member Maine_Coon turned his ASUS Eee PC 900HA into a finger-friendly 8.9-inch slate, flipping the display around and adding a touchscreen layer on top.
If the Eee PC touchscreen tutorial left you envious and disgustedly eyeing your Acer Aspire One, never fear; there’s now a new tutorial for turning the best-selling netbook into a finger-friendly marvel. The guide uses one of the commonly available 8.9-inch touchscreen panels, easily found on eBay, which come with just about everything you need bar a screwdriver.
Ultraportables with integrated optical drives are rare beasts – the netbook world only has one, for instance – and they usually carry a pretty high price premium. That was certainly the case when the VYE S41A first arrived, complete with its convertible 7-inch touchscreen, DVD burner and 800MHz Intel A110 processor: you were looking at around $1,500 when it first launched. Now, Expansys UK have it listed for just £449.99 ($661).
Sadly not a sign of ASUS’ upcoming Eee PC UMPC plans, but a very impressive DIY effort, this UMPC is based on an ASUS Eee PC 701 to which a touchscreen and new casing has been applied. That gets you a super-portable Atom based device that, at 922g, is almost half the weight of the donor Eee PC, but a whole lot more usable when on the move.
Some of our most popular netbook pages here on SlashGear are those describing DIY touchscreen projects, where a touch-sensitive layer is added to the budget ultraportable’s display. There are already kits available on eBay and elsewhere offering straightforward 7- and 8.9-inch panels, but what we’ve lacked to date is a really simple tutorial – something that takes you from stock Eee PC to touchscreen marvel. Happily, courtesy of argentum, such a guide is now available.
DIY touchscreens for netbooks aren’t new – we’ve seen them on the ASUS Eee PC and Acer Aspire One, and even a plug-&-play kit back in June – but they just seem to be hitting eBay now. Options seem to be primarily for the ASUS and Acer machines, with the Aspire One and 900/901 being the lucky recipients.
ASUS plan to unveil their touchscreen Eee PC at CES 2009 in January, with a launch early in the new year, according to Samson Hu, general manager of Eee PC business at the company. No specific details of what format the touchscreen Eee will take have been released; ASUS could choose to add a touch-sensitive panel to the screen of an existing netbook (similar to the aftermarket mods we’ve seen) or it could develop a new Eee Slate PC.
ToDo forum member stretracer18 loved his Acer Aspire One netbook, but wanted a touchscreen slate version instead; Acer not being forthcoming with such a UMPC, he created his own. Now we’ve seen touchscreen modifications of netbooks before, but this is a full case reworking: the top and bottom sections of the Aspire One have been screwed together minus the keyboard in-between, with the lid flipped round to give access to the display (with touchscreen panel) and webcam.
More photos of the Acer Aspire One UMPC after the cut
Working on the principle that there can never be too many touchscreen Eee variants, jkkmobile has a new tutorial for adding such a panel to the ASUS Eee PC 901. The 8.9-inch touchscreen panel itself costs around $70 on eBay (plus shipping); then it’s just a case of opening up the 901, locating power and USB connections, and carefully squeezing everything in.
Check out the demo video of the touchscreen Eee 901 after the cut
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