CNet Compares Eee PC Against the Competition

An anonymous reader writes "CNet has recently done a comparison of the Asus Eee PC against six bargain laptops that all fall under $1000. Included in the list is the Elonex One, OLPC, EasyNote XS and MSI Wind. "Since the Eee's launch, many of its rivals have begun to create similar alternatives — each designed to pilfer a piece of the budget ultraportable pie. Some are trying to beat the Eee on price, some on specs, but they're all tiny and they're all camped out in the bargain basement." Let the 'race to the bottom' begin."

Comments

The Eee PC's Screen is too Small

[bit trollent]

It is obvious that there is room for a larger screen on the Eee PC that wouldn't make it any bigger. So if you want to beat the Eee PC, just make the exact same screen with a screen that is as big as it can be.

I should really charge a consulting fee.

Re:The Eee PC's Screen is too Small

[Dude McDude]

The new 900 model has an 8.9" screen. http://www.asus.com/news_show.aspx?id=10302

Re:The Eee PC's Screen is too Small

[calebt3]

Maybe the screen is that small for battery conservation purposes?

Re:The Eee PC's Screen is too Small

[Kelbear]

The trick isn't just getting a larger screen on the unit, it's doing it without putting additional drain on the battery and additional burden on the pricetag.

Like many other incremental steps to today's technology, it's certainly possibly, even feasible, but nontrivial to implement. It'll take engineering, expense, and a new fab process and business relationships to mass-produce an appliance such as this.

Per the summary "Some are trying to beat the Eee on price, some on specs," and this would be an example of beating it on specs while likely yielding on the price war.

I believe there's plenty of room in the market for such competition since the EEE falls into a very small niche of quick-reference usage and ultra-portability. More an appliance than a personal computer, and as individual needs vary, people will buy the device best suited to the expected usage.

Re:The Eee PC's Screen is too Small

[Lumpy]

I dont think it's too small it NEEDS 1024X768 at a minimum for screen resolution.

Physically small is ok. A substandard resolution is not ok.

Re:The Eee PC's Screen is too Small

[deniable]

That and they're using the cheaper 7'' screens from portable DVD players. Those things have had big price drops, so that helps the price tag on the eee.

Big price diffrence there

[calebt3]

All fall under a $1000? What kind of standard is that? MY laptop was under $1000 when new, and similar laptops are now in the ~$750 range. Why get an underpowered ultraportable when a normal laptop costs just as much?

Re:Big price diffrence there

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Why get an underpowered ultraportable when a normal laptop costs just as much?

Maybe because "normal" notebooks are overpowered, overheating beasts? They aren't "laptops" because of that heat, they seem to feel like they burn through jeans when used for longer than 15 minutes on a lap, even on max power saving mode. I think that's a lot of why the marketing literature almost always calls them "notebooks".

Re:Big price diffrence there

[pipatron]

I'm very satisfied with my thinkpad x40 in that regard. I guess that's about as small as you can get while still having a keyboard you can use for hours, daily.

Re:Big price diffrence there

[Mr. Slippery]

Why get an underpowered ultraportable when a normal laptop costs just as much?

Because it's ultraportable.

My real ultraportable is a Zaurus SLC3000. It will fit in my back pocket. I use it for writing, it can also be used for emergency SSH sessions and cramped web broswing. It's usually in my backpack, ready for when poetic inspiration strikes. That's ultraportable. (The only thing more portable is my Centro. The neat thing is, my Centro becomes a modem, my Zaurus runs a terminal, and bam! SSH or browsing from anywhere I can get a cell signal, with gear that fits in my pockets.)

My ultraportable-as-this-article-is-using-the-term is an old Sony Vaio SRX77 that I've fitted with a solid state harddrive, and installed Puppy Linux on. Good sized keyboard, adequate power, under three pounds and smaller than a standard looseleaf binder. I take it when I'm headed down to the cafe to sit and write or browse for a while. Not pocketsized, by easily portable.

My full sized laptop is heavy, big, and sucks battery. It's a full-featured beast that goes with me on long trips, to replace my desktop.

Re:I'm here too soon

[sm62704]

I'm not too lazy to read it, but I refuse to read C|Net. Two paragraphs per screen, and each screen is filled with so many blinking shiney flashing ads it takes forever for each page to load.

And under $1000? WTF? They're comparing a $999 laptop with a $250 laptop? Isn't that kind of like comparing a compact car with a mid sized car? One more reason to avoid C|Net like the plague.

It's sad, that used to be a pretty good site.

Under $1000?

[Evro]

That's not exactly "bargain" space, Apple's Macbook is almost in that range, and last week I configured a Dell Vostro 1500 with a Core 2 Duo T7500 2.2 GHz, 3 GB ram, XP Home, a 256 MB GeForce 8600GT, and a 15" SXGA screen for $833.

Wow, talk about insightful

[Sockatume]

The article is, basically, a few specs and pictures from press releases lifted out and spread over 7 ad-filled pages. The same information could've been provided in a small table with some pictures next to it. No insight, no investigation, nothing that isn't public knowledge. They didn't even (as an example) do a google search for the phrase "Elonex One" which would've told them that it's a variation on a rather old unit which has been on sale in other markets for a while, so there are lots of hands-on reports (that way they could've commented on the need for a kickstand on that machine, and other useful tidbits). Heck, they reckon that the "VIA Nanobook" and "Easynote XS" are rebrandings of the "Cloudbook", without the vaguest notion of the real relationship between the machines. Just another bit of "news" accomplished by rewriting the press releases with as little thought as possible.

Re:The Elonex One???

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhm, do you read what you post? Every single hit on that search were posts in webforms complaining that that Elonex hasn't released any information about it.

Asus Eee hardly groundbreaking

[elrous0]

The assertion that Asus "flipped the laptop world on its head with a stupidly low price point" made in this article simply isn't true. Sub-$500 laptops have been around for some time now. And, for the money, the Asus really isn't even a particularly good deal. For $100 more, you can buy a laptop with an actual 60GB hard drive and much more muscular processor. The main advantage to the Eee isn't its price point, but the fact that it is very small (and the screen is perhaps too small as the parent points out), light, and durable (since it has a solid-state hard drive).

Re:Asus Eee hardly groundbreaking

[Lussarn]

Ultraportables was luxury before the EEE pc came along. Now everyone can own one. That is the main advantage. I've used computers for the last 25 years (and worked with them for 10 years) but I have never owned a laptop. To me they are just bulky, or very expensive if you want small. I'm very excited at these new computers and will buy me a EEE 900 when they are released. Small footprint, and very lightweight does it for me. CPU specs is of no importance for me on a laptop, as long as a webbrowser and the terminal is zippy I don't care.

Re:Asus Eee hardly groundbreaking

[Corporate Troll]

Utraportables are *companions* to desktops or desktop-replacements (that's what you describe). Utraportables are "just enough to do something on the move", but that's it. I mean this from a usability perspective, not from power since you can get powerful (but expensive) ultraportables.

You mention gaming, this means that the Dell is out of the question too by the way. (Integrated Graphics: forget it)

You are simply not the target demographic for an ultraportable. Cheap or not. I am, but I'm not shelling out 2000€ for an Ultraportable as they have been costing the last few years.

The Asus EEE is for me: small, usable for browsing, small text editing, etc, while I commute to work with the train. No way in hell, I'd lug around my 15.4" desktop replacement.

it just works

[pgfault]

Cnet writes:
"Okay, the hype overshadowed the fact that it's rather slow, sometimes unreliable and nearly impossible to type on if you had grown-up fingers, but these are minor details."

Minor details, perhaps, but I disagree. 900MHz is adequate for web, and text processing. Unreliable? Hardly. Zero crashes on mine. The keyboard is quite usable, once you teach your right pinky not to hit the UpArrow when going for the '/' or Shift keys. The three drawbacks I see are:
1) It's rootable out of the box (samba) http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2008/Feb/0117.html
2) Asus didn't provide an easy way to obtain updates for the masses.
3) The fan runs continuously after about 10 minutes of use.

I installed eeeXubuntu along with compiz-fusion and now it's a great little machine.

For the money and it's size, it certainly gets the job done.

Re:I'm here too soon

[genji256]

Bored with making MacBooks for Steve Jobs, one day Asus decided to create its own stylish laptop and flog it on the cheap. The result was the Eee PC -- a Linux-based ultraportable notebook that wowed consumers, shocked rival manufacturers and is slowly but surely revolutionising an industry.

But Asus is no longer alone. Since the Eee's launch, many of its rivals have begun to create similar alternatives -- each designed to pilfer a piece of the budget ultraportable pie. Some are trying to beat the Eee on price, some on specs, but they're all tiny and they're all camped out in the bargain basement. They're all real products, and a few are already available, so we've included links to our full reviews for those.

Asus Eee PC 701, £220
The Eee has racked up hundreds of thousands of sales in a relatively short space of time. It's portable, attractive, versatile and has completely flipped the laptop world on its head with a stupidly low price point.

In exchange for a touch over £200, the Eee provides a Pentium M 900MHz CPU, 512MB of RAM, Wi-Fi, a 7-inch 800x480-pixel display, and enough Linux software to keep you busy for weeks. It's awesome value.

Okay, the hype overshadowed the fact that it's rather slow, sometimes unreliable and nearly impossible to type on if you had grown-up fingers, but these are minor details. In the long run it'll be recognised as one of the decade's most important pieces of tech design. Its rivals -- including the Eee PC 901 -- will have a very hard time topping it.

Elonex One (aka GeCube Genie), £99
Let's kick things off with the Elonex One, which many geeks will also know as the GeCube Genie Jr. It's designed for school children, but will no doubt attract a much wider demographic thanks to its ludicrously low price.

The One is an attractive little unit that weighs in at 900g. Elonex says it's designed to be kid-proof in that it's shock resistant, has no moving parts and is very reliable. The main components are housed behind the 7-inch 800x480-pixel display. You get a 300MHz LNX Code 8 Mobile CPU -- no, we've never heard of it either -- 128MB of DDR2 memory and 1GB of flash memory. An enhanced version of the laptop, called the One Plus, ships with 256MB of RAM and 2GB of storage.

What else do you get for fewer than 10,000 pennies? Well, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi is standard, as is wired 10/100 Ethernet, two USB2.0 ports, built-in speakers, and the keyboard's removable so you can use the One like a tablet PC. The display isn't touch-sensitive, so you'll have to use a 'mouse emulator' -- aka nipple -- round the back. The whole thing runs on the Linux Linos 2.6.21 operating system, which comes with a variety of productivity, media and education software.

The One is never going to be the fastest computer in the world, and we're sceptical that it'll be without its problems, but you really can't go wrong for £99. It's available in pink, green, silver, white or black, and will be released in July 2008. Pre-order yours from the Elonex Web site now for a £10 deposit.

Packard Bell EasyNote XS (aka VIA Nanobook), £399
Originally the Everex Cloudbook, this petite laptop now goes by many different names: 'EasyNote XS', 'VIA Nanobook', and courtesy of some potty-mouthed Cravers: 'horrible pile of turd'. That last bit is very unfair -- the XS is pretty accomplished.

It's tiny: just 230x171x29mm and it weighs 950g. It uses a 7-inch display with an 800x480-pixel native resolution, a 1.2GHz VIA C7-M CPU, 1GB of RAM and a 30GB 2.5-inch hard drive, which

From a new owner

[dr_canak]

I purchased the ASUS EEE 4G from newegg about 6 weeks ago. There are several models to choose from, and some idiosyncracies from one model to the next. The 4G has an accessible door on the underside which allows the user to upgrade the RAM module (stock 512MB). In addition to the 4G, I purchased

- an 8Gb SDHC card
- 1 GB RAM module
- XP Home (OEM)
- DVD/CD burner
- Small Laptop Bag
- 4GB USB stick
- 1 set of samsung portable speakers (from WOOT!)

So i'm in for around $700.00 when all was said and done.

What I like:
- Ultra portable and lightweight.
- Very good battery life (around 2.5-3 hours under heavy load). This can be increased by switching off the built in webcam, switching off the wireless internet (assuming you're not browsing), reducing screen brightness, and reducing fan speed
- Ability to overclock. Someone hacked up an app that allows the user to control cpu and fan speed
- Change screen resolutions. Someone hacked up an app allowing the user to select a number of non-native screen resolutions to improve readability and desktop realestate.
- Boot up time. Mine boots XP in around 60 secs, which includes about 10 background apps (antispyware, antivirus, overclock app, screen res app, virtual desktop app, battery monitor etc...). Some people have reported an NLITE'd install of XP booting in under 30 secs.

What I don't like:
- the keyboard is small and awkward. Touchtyping is damn near impossible. Better to use some variant of 4 finger touch typing
- the stock linux install. I've used linux extensively in the past, but just don't use it enough on the desktop to achieve a high degree of familiarity. I used it for the first week, then just decided to switch to XP.
- I would imagine this thing is the opposite of "ruggedized." It feels perfectly fine, but I would hate to drop it from more than a foot. I would imagine it would be in pieces. It doesn't exactly feel sturdy.
- The need to buy a bunch of extra stuff to really make it shine. Right out of the box it's useful, but with the added purchases above, it really becomes a very decent travel laptop replacement. But those added purchases essentially doubled the price of the stock ASUS. I did enough research to know that very few folks are really using a stock machine only.
- The stock speakers are just too soft to overcome any ambient noise.
- Getting XP installed without an external CDROM can be a real challenge.

Going to this website (http://forum.eeeuser.com/) will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about what people are doing with these things, and how to do it.

hth,
jeff

'Tis an ill wind that blows no minds...

[MsGeek]

MSI Wind, £225
If there's one laptop that could seriously end the Eee's reign, it's the MSI Wind. We believe it could be the perfect blend of portability and usability, due to the fact it's slightly larger than an Eee PC, with a bigger keyboard and a choice of screen sizes.

Eight- and 10-inch versions are available, as are Silverthorne CPUs ranging from 1GHz to 1.5GHz. You even get a choice of hard drive types: there are solid-state models for anyone prone to dropping things, and 2.5-inch models for anyone who wants to store lots of multimedia files.

Best of all, the entry-level Wind is set to cost just 299 (£225), or 699 (£530) for the high-end model. Like all good uber-portables, it's available in a variety of colours including blue, silver and pink.

That sounds like the cream of the crop. MSI is a fairly quality manufacturer, and they are offering multiple configurations. The Cloudbook was promising up until I got my hands on one, however, and UGH! You can't get around that funky micro trackpad on one side and clicking buttons on another, and the damn thing gets hotter than my MacBook when crunching video. And that wasn't under any load at all.

Really, what people need to compare the Eee and its progeny to is not full-sized laptops but PDAs. The Eee, the Wind, the OLPC, etc. are more like overgrown Palms than mini notebooks. If you look at them that way, suddenly their uses present themselves. If you expect full-sized laptop performance, particularly desktop replacement laptop performance, from one of these, you are in for a rude awakening.

Re:history repeats?

[meringuoid]

Timex/Sinclair eventually came out with a minimalist Z80/ROM BASIC box with a membrane keyboard for ultra cheap - then came the crash of 1983.

In America, maybe, but Sinclair made an absolute killing with those machines in the UK. The ZX80 and ZX81 pretty much established the home computer market, and then the Spectrum turned up with colour graphics and became the standard machine for a generation of gamers and hackers. It was a long time before Nintendo managed to break that market; even as late as the 16-bit era, the Amiga was serious competition for the SNES and Mega Drive.

The interesting thing about that era was that these machines were largely incompatible with each other, but that didn't matter so much - they were cheap. Vastly cheaper than the contemporary IBM and Apple machines. Will the mass market accept compatibility troubles from a non-Microsoft machine, if it means they can have it for peanuts? Quite possibly.

I don't understand

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Prices for these usable machines seem to start at ~150USD. I don't understand, then, why I /still/ can't find a sub-100USD thin client device with VGA out, understands X11, WiFi and has USB inputs for keyboard/mouse. These seem to start at $250, with $400-500 being more common -- especially among those that can connect to an X11 server. Given that they surely can't be cheaper to make than a fully functional mini-laptop with HDD, why the hell don't they exist?

Just bought one

[British]

I went on a business trip to Taipei, and bought one on the last day. It's the 4g model with webcam(whichever one that is). After changing it from Chinese to English in 1 minute, I was up & away. The only downside is it can't see my wireless network, but it now sees wireless networks my mainstream laptop can't see around my house. While it can't do everything a laptop can, it is great for taking to the coffee shop for a quick web or email fix.

Voice Command is hilarious. You can amuse your non computer-savy friends by saying "COMPUTER WEB" and it fires up Firefox. Love the crude computer voice it blares out. Just wish it had the "computer" sound from Star Trek:TNG for the added futurism.

I am surprisingly LIKING the hacked-up Linux they used on this. It's even easier to use than Ubuntu. Their simple frontend GUI is actually pleasant to use. I was surprised to login to my linux samba server and have it work on the first try. Just wish I could find the place to change my EEE's computer name/workgroup.

Their wireless connectivity thing is better than Windows, listing connectivity percentages and such, and a text window output of the progress of connecting to the AP. Wish Windows was more like that.

While the keyboard takes getting used to, I like the Function key bindings to various functions(speaker, wireless, etc) to the top row. I have some typing experience on tiny keyboards on its spiritial successor, the Zeos Pocket PC, made 18 years prior. The zeos' keyboard is a bit more "keyboardish"(ie more travel to the keys), but the ASUS one is just fine.

I wonder if some marketing guy had a Zeos pocket pc and thought "hey, let's make an updated version of this!".

It cost me almost NT12000 and to me, is worth every penny. Just wish the bag was a bit bigger to hold the power supply.

Re:I'm here too soon

[bendodge]

It's also missing the Nokia N800. It certainly seems to fit the bill: a small computer, running Linux, WiFi, a tiny 256MB of internal flash, etc. And it's less than $250. It even uses a 800x480 touch screen (no keyboard), so I would rank it pretty highly against the Eee.