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Just What is this ASUS Eee Thing Anyway?
davidmwilliams writes "ASUS have released a cheap subnotebook. It is far from state-of-the-art tech-wise, with 512Mb RAM and a Celeron processor. It has a 4Gb hard drive and no optical drive. Its screen is 7" and runs at the odd resolution of 800x480 and the operating system looks like something Fisher Price might have designed. Why would you buy it? What on earth can you do with this?" I've been wondering this myself given the huge coverage in the media of this thing.
Seriously? It is a super portable laptop, or high-feature rich PDA. The specs you list don't sound like much compared to your home PC but are pretty nice on the road when compared to a Palm. It is just another middle ground tool, but the surprising part is that it was done with open source and thus the price has been kept way down.
There are at least two hardware modifications aka moddings for the ASUS Eee PC mentioned at Repair4Laptop. One explains how to add an internal USB Bluetooth port to the sub-notebook without affecting the built-in wireless or using the empty mini PCIe card slot. The other describes how to install an internal 3G Card.
It's hard to type on if you're used to regular sized keyboards, but it gets the job done. Three hours of battery life isn't that great considering the OLPC gets about 12, and better protected from the environment too. ftfa: "It's endless world of hardware modifications that smart people worldwide have embraced" Um.. what the hell is that supposed to mean?
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The Eee PC uses unionfs to merge together two partitions: sda1 (/mnt-system, 2.3GB, read-only) and sda2 (/mnt-user, 1.4GB, read-write)
There is a grub boot option "Restore Factory Settings" which wipes the user part.
Deleting installed applications doesn't free up any space - it just marks them as deleted on the user partition.
My dad purchased one, half to play around with, half to actually use. It certainly is not a replacement for a full sized laptop or desktop, but it fits the bill for what he uses it for pretty nicely. The church he attends has a penchant for springing preaching duties on him at the last minute. Instead of carrying a folder full of old sermon notes, he simply carries the ASUS now. Now he has years worth of sermons and notes at his fingertips. Like I said, I would never want to use it as a real PC, but for keeping in touch on the road or just keeping important info handy, its tough to beat.
Having actually used one, I can say, it rocks. Ok so I wouldn't like to use it as a main machine (not what it was designed for) but if you are an avid note taker, or like to have internet on the run it is all you could want. It is *exceptionally* light, even compared to the JVC mini note range that I look after every day.
Also, its pretty much instant on. So your not hanging round for things to happen. It's ideal to check mail, a few letters whilst in the wifi coffee shop. Its an ideal meeting toy I suppose.
Also a massive advantage of this for linux is that a) A linux company is getting paid to put an OS on hardware and secondly, the hardware and software fit well together, they were designed too.
As for the interface, hell its good. It's simple and quick. What more could you need. If you want more advanced options, turn on the advanced options, its not hard.
The really mad thing? It's not linux peeps buying it, its average shoppers and gadget freaks. Its providing an inroad to the masses that standard linux cannot because of the variety of hardware it must work on.
Put another way, in the uk, you cannot buy one for love nor money at the moment, and probably not until mid April will there be sufficient stocks.
http://www.writeitfor.us - Writing IT for the IT generation.
It is not just Slashdot - the Register and various other IT press outfits in the UK have covered it quite extensively including the pros and cons of running Windows on the thing and even one attempt to load MacOS on it.
Frankly, it is a geek toy. I would have bought one, if I did not have a personal notebook, a company notebook, 3 working computers doing different things around the house and enough parts to assemble 7 more in my loft (obtained for free or nearly free from dot-bomb and post-dot-bomb craters). I am not the average geek though. I can say "NO" to myself when it comes to gadgets. Most geeks cannot and as a result it is definitely on their Christmas shopping list (for that amount of money it is not surprising).
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Believe it or not, the "huge media coverage" that I've noticed of this thing has only been on Slashdot. Other than that, it's a big name manufacturer, in our world it's huge news.
Really? I just saw it in one of the big Dutch newspapers Saturday:
http://www.parool.nl/media/2007/DEC/122907-eeepc.html
Looking at Google News shows it in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Independent, the New Zealand Herald, and so on. Googling for specific newspapers shows articles in the Washington Post, New York Times, the Sun, and so on. It's referenced in an article in the Wall Street Journal. This is all outside of the IT press, mind you!
Since another article claimed we had forgotten about it, Google Trends claims the eee have surpassed ThinkPad, and close to but not still on par with MacBook. If we look at Google News instead, the advantage over ThinkPad is even greater, and even "asus eee" has have more than three times the number of hits than ThinkPad, and half the hits of the MacBook.
I'd consider a position between two of the most recognized brands pretty good.
On the other hands, if we were to believe Internet statistics, Ron Paul would be elected president with the greatest margin in the history of the country.
1) eee PC has a 900MHZ Celeron CPU which IS UNDERCLOCKED and runs at only 630 MHZ.
2) Nokia N800 is MUCH better than N810,half the price of N810 and supports up to 32GB storage = 2x16GB SDHC compared to max 12GB = 2x6 mini SDHC for N810. Sure in the future 16GB mini SDHCs will show up and this difference will disappear.
I've had one of these for nearly two months now. It runs Ubuntu Gutsy just fine, with all your favourite apps. I'm typing this comment on it, in fact.
It has everything a laptop should (except a CDROM), and plays music, browses the web, runs OpenOffice, etc. It's not helpful to think of it as a "cut-down" or "toy" machine. It's really a pretty standard PC. It generally feels very fast and responsive, perhaps because all the storage is solid state.
It even runs Compiz-fusion flawlessly.
I've been using it over the last couple off weeks as my main machine. My only complaint is that the screen res is low and up-arrow key and right-shift key are too close together, and they have a similar symbol on them.
I picked up a 4G surf model.
Can't speak for everyone, but mine is the laptop I actually USE on a regular basis. I'm hesitant to whip out my Toshiba R15 tablet, since it's heavy, and slow to boot. The EE is up in 30 seconds, and thanks to the SSD doesn't balk at being tossed around a bit.
I'll grab it on the way out of the house and just drag it with me like my camera. I've used it in conjunction with my cellphone to check mail on the road, research products, or do a quick wiki lookup when conversation requires. It's also pretty hand for doing photo previews in the field. The SD slot makes reading my casual camera's card easy.
With screen rotation, I can hold it vertically and read e-books and manga scanlations like I would with a paperback.
I've done some coding and remote work with it, but I wouldn't recommend it. Keyboard is way too small for that sort of thing.
About the only thing I haven't done on my EEE is gaming, which is clearly beyond the intent of the unit. That said, I'll bet it'd make a great classic game / emulator platform.
Now that's not to say I don't have my gripes. As I mentioned, the keyboard is just a tad too small. I've had to learn to type with six finger and a thumb. The right shift STILL stymies me 4 weeks after my purchase. There's no capslock indicator, which has caused me no end of trouble when entering passwords. Can't do a middle button emulation click with the rocker style mouse button.
But none of these are game enders. Annoyances yes, but given what ASUS is charging for this little beastie, I'm not expecting perfection. I'm expecting usable, with minor compromises, and that's exactly what I got. Really, the EEE was probably the most satisfying notebook purchase I've ever made.
If there's a castle floating upside down in the sky, then there's a castle floating upside down in the sky.
FYI: I'm not the OP.
http://www.nliteos.com/
I'm doing an nLited XP on the EEE. Boot time is less tha 30 seconds. You'll need a valid XP license, and the XP installation files. You'll run nLite, select which packages you want to include in your XP install, and nLite copies only the files you need to a target device or ISO file.
From there, you create your own install media (a CD in my case) and do a plain vanilla XP install.
It's probably possible to dual boot Xandros, but I wasn't pleased enough with Xandros to bother. What really kills this though is the small storage size of anything but the 8G unit. The default Xandros left very little disc space on my 4G. Certainly not enough to put XP next to it.
If there's a castle floating upside down in the sky, then there's a castle floating upside down in the sky.
I have one of these. The builtin linux is tweakable enough (like by adding standard debian 4.0 repos to the apt config) so you can install dwm - and from there, you have a very light device that boots into a terminal in under 15 seconds, and you can do everything you usually do "online" (irc and mail through ssh, music through nfs or netradio with moc, web with firefox, etc).
It's easily powerful enough to watch movies, play flash (youtube of course), some opengl games. The keyboard is also very good; if you do your coding through the unix interface (make etc) as you should, instead of some GUI BS, it's very usable for programming, too. (Of course, you should use the keyboard instead of a pointing device to do your stuff; but that's true for any computer, not just the EEE.)
Battery is strong enough to give you 3 hours of movie watching over NFS over wifi.
Negative points I could bring up: it gets warmer than my Lenovo 3000 V100 (although the Lenovo is supposed to be a markedly cool model), and the builtin fan (the single moving part) is audible at times. I can live with these problems - and the EEE makes a lovely modern replacement for my old Toshiba Libretto C100.
we discovered a new way to think.
Anonymous parent is right - the Eee is 630 MHz. It is NOT 900 MHz, even though all the press articles and even some of the retailer descriptions say this. This was a major disappointment when I bought one.
Nuh, pinched straight from Blender. That's why MS can't get a patent on it.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Bias warning: I'm typing this on an Eee PC 8G.
The thing about this machine over that Dell is that if I buy the home edition of such a machine I'm stuck with Vista which will need way more overhead than this, will require antivirus software, uses software that is not free, and will slow down starting the first time I use it. That was what happened with the last Windows PC I bought (and I mean the last one I'll buy).
I was going to get a MacBook but it too is pretty big and portability was a big factor for me. I got this on a whim thinking that if it wouldn't work I could give it to my six year old (who is now trying to pry it out of my hands). It works. It works very well and the keyboard is pretty easy even for a guy with giant hands like mine.
Running Linux (pre-installed) is great. It has worked better for me than my Windows laptop. And even when the screen is a bit small, I hook up a monitor. Simple. For the price, and for my tastes, it can't be beat.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
The Mac OS X dock is directly from NeXTstep and I pity the fool who thinks it has anything to do with the Windows 95 taskbar.
With a large (8 cell) batery, the x40 is nearly double weight of the eee.
Being an EEE user myself, I have to disagree. If I was in the market for a 15" laptop I would have gone with a Dell. However, I commute to school by bike (uphill both ways!) and weight is hugely important. This machine is light, tiny, durable, cheap, full-featured, and comes with a 2-year warranty. Where else can I get that?