Taiwan’s Asus, once known primarily for motherboards, hopes to carve out a new niche with ultra-small notebooks or netbooks. Its latest offerings are the Eee 901 and 1000 with 8.9-inch and 10-inch screens respectively and weighing in at around 1kg.

Asus has switched to Intel’s new Atom processor for these models while the rest of the spec is similar to the predecessor Asus Eee 900 including the use of solid-state drives instead of hard disks and a choice of Windows XP or Linux. The Eee 901 sells for about $559 in Taiwan, pricing elsewhere has still to be announced.