Take One Asus EEE and get 7 Inches of Pleasure

There is a new breed of laptop moving in and it is small and cheap and its name is the Asus EEE PC. Strange name to be sure but Asus has proven with this device that there is a very large market for very small and cheap laptops. To backstop this new device is a user community that has sprung up and wrapped their arms around this product.

Staying connected to the office in the early days meant having a pager, a two way radio and when at home I dialed in to the office server via modem. Since then I've carried a PDA and a cell phone and now a PDA/phone and a laptop. The PDA phone is great but it lacks the functionality of a laptop and the software and Internet experience leaves much to be desired.
My laptop is now getting old and unreliable for travel so I've been looking for a replacement. Something small, light with great battery life so I'm not tethered to a cable when at home or away. unfortunately the kind of laptop that would interest me seemed always to be the most expensive and considering the life expectancy and reliability of a laptop, I really didn't want to spend top dollar. Also, I wanted to run Linux and Linux based laptops are few are far between especially for the consumer market and getting my favorite Linux distro to work on my laptop and even my desktop has posed challenges but that's another story. So herein lies the dilemma. I want small and light at an entry level price. Eventually I resolved myself to the fact that I'd be spending more than $1700 for a new laptop.

Over the last 3 years or so I've been following the One Laptop Per Child project. The OLPC computer seemed like it would be a great product being small and cheap but it has been a pipe dream for many years and in my opinion still continues to be even though they are now finally shipping. Hopefully they work out the bugs and I can feel good about buying one for a 3rd world child as well as for my own. Also, the potential of mesh wireless networks is very compelling.

So it was while I was reading up on the just released OLPC computers in January that I came across a post that referred to a capable alternative by the name of Asus EEE PC. Now I was getting somewhere. Could this be my next laptop. I have been using Asus motherboards in my computers for over 10 years and I have found them to be of good quality and I know hey have been making laptops for a while now, so I felt comfortable with the manufacturer which made the decision a simple one.
I researched by reading reviews written by early adopters and weighed the pros and con's against my own needs.
The EEE laptop is described as small, light, with good battery life, has a SSD instead of a hard drive (more on that later) and runs on a Linux based operating system. The hardware is an open x86 platform that will run Windows XP as well as potentially other x86 OS. There are even rumblings of it being able to run a MAC OS.
I figured that at $400 it was worth the risk and to give one a try. At that price I could always just give it to my young daughter if it didn't do the trick and I'd still have enough in the budget to buy a mainstream laptop.
So I took the leap and bought the 4Gig model (only about 1.3GB of which is actually free) that comes with a larger battery and a video camera. I figured that the extra $50 for the longer battery life was worth it. The unit comes with 512 of DDR2 Ram, 7" LCD screen (800X480), speakers, microphone, touchpad, Wireless b/g, 3 USB ports, VGA port, a Asus simplified version of Xandross operating system (Linux) which includes video and music player, OpenOffice for documents and spreadsheets etc, the FireFox browser, Skype, Pidgin messenger which is capable of working with MSN and Yahoo messenger services as well as others.

Out of the box the EEE is small and light at just over 2 lbs but doesn't feel cheap or flimsy. As I open the lid the hinges feel tight and strong revealing the 7" screen bordered by two black side panels about an inch and a half wide where the speakers hide. After plugging the unit in and letting it fully charge for an hour or so I placed it on my desk and hit the power button. In about 20 seconds the desktop interface appears which is populated with large icons and 6 tabs at the top that reveal basic applications for productivity, media, administration and some games.
The reason this system boots to the desktop so quickly is partly because of the simplification of the OS and the fact that a SSD is approximately 100 times faster than a standard hard disk. It's more reliable, produces less heat and consumes far less power so you can get more uptime with a smaller battery.
The interface is pleasing and functional.
I click on the Network Icon and am presented with a simple application to create my wireless network connection. After a few clicks and entering my security details and clicking on connect I'm on my home network. The wireless network icon on the taskbar on the bottom of the screen tells me I have an 86% connection. Both my Averatec and IBM laptop barely got as high as 40% and we've suffered continual network drop outs from this same location in my house so already I'm impressed. After almost a month of use this baby has never dropped a connection with my Dlink router.
I click once on the web icon and FireFox 2 greets me with it's usual prowess. I quickly configure it to my liking and start browsing. The first thing that you're aware of is that the resolution of the laptop screen is small and I have to shrink the text size so I can see most of the web page I'm looking at. Most web pages will fit nicely onto the screen but pages like my.yahoo portal and other wider web pages will force you to scroll to the right to see the whole page. This, I find, is a minor inconvenience even though I'm on my yahoo portal page quite a bit. I also use Google Docs every day and that service poses no issues whatsoever.

This brings me to typing on the EEE's very small keyboard. For me, it didn't take long for me to efficiently touch type on the keyboard but I could definitely see how some would find this keyboard too daunting due to the small size of the keys. The shift key is also in a strange place but again there is a workaround to move it to a more usable spot. In respect to the touchpad, it is smaller than you would find on a regular laptop but I hate touchpads anyway and this one seems to be worse than others. No matter to me though as I always use an external mouse. To my thinking a track point should be standard on every laptop but I guess I'm in the minority. The touchpad will scroll in both directions and you can get it to circular scroll which is quite convenient on a small screen but you'll need to do some tweaking to get that functionality. Again the community of users is quite robust so from basic tweaks to all out hardware and OS reconfigurations help is just a click away.

Can I do real work on this thing? I can!
Browse, email, write and connect to and run anything on my Windows desktop computer with remote desktop. I write a lot and use Google docs for documents which is assessable with a browser and an Internet connection. If you haven't ever used Google Docs or any of the other Google applications you should check this out as they just keep getting better. I can see myself moving completely to Google services at some point in the future but for right now Google Apps and Yahoo's portal are the on-line services what I use mostly.
On the personal side my wife's family is 3000 miles away so we have been using Skype with video so the grandparents can see and talk to their grand-kids. This little device has Skype, a mic and a video camera so now we can be anywhere in the house or anywhere we have an Internet connection and connect with the extended family. This feature alone has proved more valuable than gold to my family. We don't have to be tethered to my wife's desktop any longer. Also, being able to play a movie or listen to music wherever we are is a nice feature. The sound and picture are quite good playing music and Video and it is capable of playing almost anything you can throw at it although it doesn't have a DVD player built in so you'll have to use an SD card or a USB device. I haven't been on a plane with this device yet but I am looking forward to it. I can place 4 compressed movies and hundreds of songs on a 4G SD card and I'm ready to travel.

What I am looking for ultimately is a replacement for my wireless PDA, something with WiFi, a high resolution screen and a standard operating system capable of serving up desktop applications including a fully functional FireFox. And something that doesn't tie me into any wireless service provider. The EEE is a more than capable PDA out of the box but is too large to be a wireless phone so I'm still waiting for that convergence to materialize.

If you are looking for an cheap ultra portable this may be the perfect stop gap measure at least until other low cost ultra portable products prove themselves worthy in the marketplace or wireless phones can provide laptop functionality. So far, from what I have read, products that are soon to be or already in the cheap ultra portable space will be much more expensive. It will be hard to justify a purchase of $600 or more for an ultra portable when I can buy a mainstream laptop for around the same price with much more power and many more features. Competitive products that are currently in the market now are the Intel Classmate, Everex CloudBook, OLPC XO and the just freshly released HP 2133 Mini-Note PC.
Now that Asus has proved that their is a market for cheap ultra mobile computers I expect we'll see many new competitors very soon. Asus itself has announced a new version with a 9" screen and Windows XP and there are rumors it will include a touchscreen. We'll likely have to wait until summer to see one in action.

This thing may not be for everyone but it has won me over and I love it. I haven't used my old laptop since.

In part two I will list all the the tweaks and updates I've added to suit my needs. So until then I'll pass along one of the best on-line resources for this product. http://www.eeeuser.com/

Update as of February 2009

Well it's been a year since my purchase and a lot has happened in the NetBook world and I'd have to say for the better. Processors are faster, screens are bigger and standard hard drives seem to have usurped the SSD.
I'm moved from the ASUS Linux OS and moved to XP to gain a better screen resolution and can't wait to buy a newer model retiring this one to my daughter.