ASUS Demos Snapdragon-Based Eee PC With Android

In their continued quest to hash out absolutely every permutation of the netbook category, ASUS has created something pretty interesting: a passively-cooled Android netbook based on the ultra-low-draw Qualcomm Snapdragon platform.

From the outside, this particular model is a spitting image of the fantastic 1008HA Seashell, but this is just one of a few styles the company is showing off at Computex. Inside is a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, which is based on ARM architecture and first used in a smartphone, not a netbook—though their latest update to the platform, also announced at Computex, has unashamed netbook ambitions. Using this hardware means that this particular Eee doesn’t need a fan—or even a heatsink—to keep cool, and that power consumption would be slight, even compared to netbooks based on Intel’s power-sipping Atom.

As evidenced by the video below, the concept of using raw Android on a netbook is still flawed from a usability standpoint, but that’s nothing a little interface tweaking couldn’t take care of. [Tweaktown]