Asus R50A UMPC is shipping- if you can afford it
Kevin and I first got to see the R50A UMPC at the Asus press event at the CES last January and we were pretty impressed. The R50A is the successor to the first UMPC from Asus, the R2H and what we saw was a genuine improvement in every area. We have been looking for the R50A to appear in the real world all year but that didn’t happen until now.
Informatic Center, a retailer based in Madrid, is now offering the R50A to customers and even have a video unboxing to try and open customer’s wallets. It might take more than that as the asking price of this UMPC is a staggering Euros 1475. That’s about $1885 to those of us in the US and that’s just, well, staggering. The R50A is equipped with a 1.33 GHz Atom processor, 1 GB of memory, a 32 GB SSD and integrated GPS but still, at that price you can get a lot more computer these days. I’m afraid it’s too little, too late for too much for Asus.
I *really* like the form factor, but I agree – theasking price is absolutely ridiculous ! Mebbe we can hope that the cost could be substantially lower if Asus imports it en masse to North America…