Laptop Thoughts: The ASUS Eee Note EA800 Unboxed

"The EA800 was released at IT Month 2010 in Taiwan on December 4th. We've managed to get our hands on the ereader on steriods and flashed it with the english operating system courtesy of ASUS. The 8-inch device is equipped with a Marvell processor, Linux operating system and supports Wi-Fi, shorthand writing and camera functions. The device also has a 3700mAh battery to provide a run-time of 10 hours per charge with wifi on, 13 hours with wifi off and 10 days of standby time. As any good student focused device should be capable of supporting a variety of e-book formats such as TXT, PDF and EPUB."

Take a Kindle, give it a larger touch screen, then give it some apps and you have something sort of like the ASUS Eee Note EA800...though it's bigger and heavier of course. The price point is around $200, which is quite low when you compare the capabilities of the EA800 to other eBook readers - but once you watch the lack of speed in launching apps, the price point makes more sense. I'm not sure how much of a market there is for a device like this, even amongst students - what do you think?