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I just spent about 20 minutes going through ASUS’ list of US resellers looking to see if I could uncover any more information on the availability of the R2H, presales, any news really. The only reseller who currently lists the R2H is StarTech. I called this reseller and unfortunately the man I talked to could not verify any of the information that I got yesterday. He told me that right now he was simply taking emails of people who were interested in the R2H and after I gave him my name and email he said he’d be in touch with me when he had some news.

ASUS: Why keep everyone in the dark?

I just got off the phone with ASUS customer support — notebook presales department, and happened to get a bit of good news. The woman I had talked to said that US shipments should be in by the beginning of October if not by the end of September. The device should be available through ASUS’ online resellers. When I asked about the pricing she said that the device would be $999. She said that the price would be for a standard model. She said that the standard model has a 60GB hard drive with 768MB RAM. She confirmed that the device also has the embedded GPS, camera, WI-FI, and Bluetooth.

Hugo Ortega over at http://ubertablet.blogspot.com/ happened to get a present in the mail. That little present happened to be the first Vega UMPC by Radeon. Now I happened to blog about the Vega a few months back. I was taking the specs at face value. Hugo gives the device a very good first review. He seems to love the screen and how responsive the screen is to the pen. Hugo also seems quite impressed with the usefulness of the key combinations available.

My Opinions: The device looks as though it isn’t too small. I had worried from original documention that the device would simply be too small. Also, Why a WI-FI stick? The device looks great, until you realize that Hugo has a stick that looks similar to a pen drive sticking out of it just to surf the internet. Also I’d like to know how responsive the device is, and how memory use is. I’ve always said that i’d like to use whichever umpc I end up purchasing to code on (at least a little) so i’d like to know that I would be able to install a reasonably quick version of Visual Studio. The ever present question of battery life. Hugo’s unboxing was great to see, however how long did that charge last?

I think this may be the tip of the iceberg for the Vega. If the price point is right aand the battery life is reasonable, is this a possible competitor to the Q1 and EO models?

UPDATE (9/12): Chippy over at Carrypad is reporting that the Vega is getting a battery life of 4 hours 17 minutes!  WOW!