Asus Eee PC: Easy to Learn, Work, or Play
These are the three defining factors to remember when thinking about the new Asus Eee PC. The Asus Eee PC retains the looks of a fairly conventional ultra-portable laptop, shrunken down to about one-third of its size. With a 7-inch screen, the laptop weighs 2 pounds and measures 8.86 inches wide by 6.3 inches deep by a little less than an inch thick at it’s thinnest. To put it in perspective, the Eee PC is about the size of your typical paperback book.
With the Asus Eee PC bumps and shocks are no longer issues, because it features a dependable solid-state storage drive that gives you unparalleled shock-protection and reliability. There are several options available, and the choices range from exterior colors to storage space. The Asus Eee PC is available in Pure White, Blush Pink, Sky Blue, Lush Green, and Galaxy Black. As if that decision wasn’t already a tough one, the Asus Eee PC is being offered in 2G, 4G, and 8G models (2GB, 4GB, and 8GB SSD respectively). The choice is yours. Options are what help differentiate this notebook from the competition.
You’re probably thinking if the footprint is so small it’s probably missing a lot of the standard features found on most of today’s laptops right? Well you’d be wrong. The easiest way to describe the Asus Eee PC is design meets functionality. Asus managed to fit the Eee PC with 3 USB 2.0 ports, a RJ-45 port, a headphone and microphone jack, VGA port, and a media card slot. And even though the keyboard is relatively small, it’s one of the more functional keyboards I’ve used in comparison to other ultra-portable computers. The touchpad measures 1.75 inches by 1.25 inches and works well on the whole, but there’s only a single mouse button and that takes some getting used to. To differentiate between a left and a right mouse click, you click the corresponding side of the button. Personally, I’d prefer to have two separate buttons but it’s not a deal breaker by any means.
The 7-inch screen is a good size but looks smaller than it really is due to the large black screen bezel that frames it. The extra space around the screen does serve a purpose: tiny speakers reside on the left and right sides of the display. The sound isn’t deafening, but it’s passable sound for things such as YouTube videos. With a resolution of 800 x 480, don’t expect simultaneous side-by-side page viewing. You can also bank on having to horizontally scroll when viewing web pages as most web pages span more than 800 pixels in width. On the plus side, the combination of a low resolution and a small display produce legible type that would normally require squinting to view.
The biggest adjustment most users will encounter with the Asus Eee PC is trading Windows for the Linux operating system. While this machine is technically capable of supporting Windows right now, Linux is the only option. While the scant storage space and unfamiliar (to many) operating system might make it hard to get the software you need, the Eee actually sports a very user-friendly custom Linux installation, and many of the apps you’ll want are preloaded and easy to access through a series of tabbed desktop pages. Firefox is there for Web surfing and OpenOffice 2.0 for working with word-processing documents and spreadsheets. Both should already be familiar to Windows users (and OpenOffice is an especially appealing solution, as it reads and writes the popular Microsoft Office formats, and is worth checking out even for dedicated Windows users). There’s also a generic media player, an instant messaging client that works with AOL, Yahoo, and other popular IM systems, and a handful of preinstalled casual games. Under the settings tab, you can check system information, add and remove programs, and perform diagnostic tests. It’s a reasonably useful selection of software, and for Web surfing and working with documents, perfectly acceptable. You may, however, miss some popular software that won’t run on Linux, such as iTunes or Photoshop.
The Bottom Line: The new Asus Eee PC brings portable computing to the next level. At 7-inches and weighing only 2 pounds, you can take the Eee PC anywhere. This amazing little notebook features rich network and wireless connectivity, a graphic user interface for simplicity and ease of use, and more than 40 built-in applications.
Awesome review of the Eee PC! You should definitely do another post on it talking about all the different mods you can do to it now. Tiger direct really has a ton of the parts you’d need to do most of the mods that have become pretty common.