Hands-On with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Powered ASUS Eee PC

We were gearing up for some netbooks of a different color here at Computex and kicking off the show this afternoon was Qualcomm’s announcement of its plans to team up with ASUS to bring a Snapdragon netbook to market. We saw Snapdragon “smartbooks” at both Mobile World Congress and at CTIA this year but this is Qualcomm’s first netbook device announcement.

The company showed off a version of a 10-inch Eee PC that looks extremely similar to the 1008HA (or Seashell) but has a Snapdragon processor and runs Google’s Android operating system instead of Windows.

Based on the ARM architecture, the 1GHz Snapdragon processor allows the netbook to be thinner and lighter and does not require a fan. While less powerful than Intel’s Atom solution, the netbook should run for 8 to 10 hours even with cellular capability activated and only a three-cell battery attached.

The Snapdragon-based Eee PC we examined was running Android (another was running Xandros). The 1.5 version of Android was simply a port over of the smartphone OS and there were a few quirks to it, including the appearance of an on-screen keyboard. However, we were able to open the drawer and launch the built-in browser with ease. A Google search for “laptopmag” took less than 3 seconds but navigating to the site over 3G took close to 10 seconds. The performance of the rest of the OS was typical of a smartphone, with the system taking several seconds to open most applications. A preloaded video on the netbook played back smoothly though that was the only task running.

According to Qualcomm the Snapdragon-based Eee PC should hit the market by the end of the year. However, there was no ASUS representative at the press conference to confirm this date. No word on pricing.