New UMPC - ASUS R2H

There are an increasing number of people who are recognising the UMPCs potential as an in-car PC. Rather than going to the trouble of routing cables from some sort of tiny PC to a seperate touchscreen, it's all built in. Still, if you wanted GPS you'd still have to run a cable to a seperate unit; either that or trade battery life for the convenience of a Bluetooth connection. But now ASUS, being helpful people, has snipped another cable (virtual or real) by building a GPS receiver into its new R2H.

As well as the convenience of knowing exactly where you are, ASUS has made it possible to know exactly who you are with a built-in fingerprint sensor. Sadly the rest of the standard specs are pretty passé; 256mb of ram isn't really enough to let the Tablet PC OS whip along like it can do (although it can – and should – be upgraded to 1gb), and the 900MHz Celeron CPU isn't the Pentium M all the UMPC afficianados are begging for. The deliciously named "ASUS Splendid Video Intelligent Engine" drives a 7" touchscreen that's ideal for in-car finger jabbing, and there's a full gammut of a/b/g wireless and Bluetooth 2.0.

I'd like to think that all the "added extras" will make up for any performance lag, but we won't know until the review units get handed out.

Press Release [Asus.com]