Hands-on with my new Asus eee PC
Kevin's hand vs. eee PC
(Credit: Dave Rosenberg)Let me start with this: this thing is small, like s-m-all small. It's smaller than the paper notebook that I carry around with me. And it's light. You can put it in your coat pocket (if you have a big coat obviously--like the ones all the bad kids use to shoplift etc.) with minimal effect. This is exactly the laptop that you want when you go to a trade show or do interviews or meetings or whatever when you don't need all your data with you. It also supports some pretty good resolutions so you could do presentations on it as well.
Setup was minimal--basically you plug it in and it works. We did however run into a pretty miserable snag with our ultra-secure office wifi network where the eee wouldn't authenticate properly. Something about the mad wifi drivers, I think. When I took it home it jumped right on the wireless network and I was off and running.
eee meets big-boy monitor
(Credit: Dave Rosenberg)-The keyboard is small but you get used to it surprisingly quickly if you are a touch typer. I find the keys to have good spring and I am typing pretty fast on it already
-The bundled applications pretty much meet any need you have with the exception of syncing a mobile device, which I simply couldn't figure out. Otherwise I am hard pressed to find anything that I *can't* do with the eee.
-Download the Littlefox theme for Firefox and you are golden
-Skype and Pidgin (open source AIM) worked OOTB
-It comes with a surprisingly well-designed UI--separated into Internet, Work, Learn, Play, Settings and Favorites
-You have shell access should you want to hack some Windows server
The bad:
-The trackpad starts out really spazzy and the mouse clicky thing takes a minute to get used to. I believe there is some advanced functions you can assign but one side is much harder than the other. I assume this is user error.
-The screen real estate is still pretty small and you lose about 2 inches to speakers. I would have settled for less rock and more room.
So far, I think it's fantastic. Go get yourself one before they all sell out again.
Side note: these photos were taken on an iPhone...kinda lame
What impresses me about this little PC is its speed. Ten seconds to boot up and less than two seconds to shut down. The Linux Adobe PDF reader starts instantly, unlike the Windows version that takes at least 30 seconds install a plethora of drivers.
This will be a terrific replacement for my 15.4-inch wide-screen multimedia notebook. I use the notebook primarily for school and don't need Windows there at all.
Don't get me wrong. I have no quarrels with Windows. I've been using it since Win 3.0 and think that XP is the best OS that MS has come up with. But it's too slow and too big. I'm not a Microsoft hater nor a Mac fanatic nor a Linux apostle.
I've got Ubuntu 7 on my desktop, but I run Windows on that 99.9% of the time. The little bit I've done with Ubuntu has impressed me, though, because it, too, booted up rapidly and just worked straight out of the box. I did try some other distro in VMWare's free VMWare player, but I wasn't at all impressed with it.
I'm hoping that I can get used to tne Xandros Linux OS on the Eee PC and hoping that it works as well as Windows. That's one reason I bought this sweet little Eee PC. If Linux doesn't work out, I've got an OEM version of Win XP that I can install: the machine comes with all the necessary XP drivers.
The only major downer with the Eee PC is that the maximum RAM right now is only 1 GB. I'm not yet sure how big an SD card it can read. Deb Shinder says that there are 16-GB SD cards, but the vendors I know here in Taiwan haven't seen any.
The screen size is no problem for me because the resolution of the monitor is good enough to allow me to read whatever I've seen on it so far. And I now use two 22-inch LCD monitors on my desktop so that I can read huge fonts.
I recommend using the mouse provided with the machine instead of the touchpad. That works, but a mouse is so much better. I will probably also use a slightly larger USB keyboard instead of the tiny one that comes on the notebook. My fingers are very fat. I'm a touch typist, but I frequently hit two keys at once on a full-sized keyboard because of the width of my fingers.
All in all, I think the Eee PC is worth every penny I paid for it: US$450.