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Early Look At ASUS Eee PC 901 With Intel Atom CPU
Might E. Mouse writes "Reviews are hitting the net for the first Intel Atom-powered netbooks, and TrustedReviews has posted one for the ASUS Eee PC 901 20G Linux Edition. Has ASUS won the Atom(ic) war before it even started? With features like Wireless-N and a 6600mAh battery good for four to seven hours, that might well be the case. TR rated it highly, but I'm going to wait for their MSI Wind review before making a purchase — their first look at the Wind showed a better keyboard and larger storage."
An anonymous reader notes that despite the increased capabilities, the 901 debuts at a lower cost than its predecessor.
with MSI, eeePC, XO v2.0 and a host of other micronotebooks, I'm going to wait another year for it all to solidify. There's a lot of speculation right now, and I'd like to see a market tested, proven platform I can compare to all the others before I buy.
If it had been up to Microsoft and Sony, we'd still be stuck with overpriced $2000 executive toys running Microsoft Vista like molasses.
FOSS has made it possible to create these machines and circumvent Microsoft's near monopoly, because if any of these companies had asked Microsoft to keep XP going for ultralights, Microsoft would have told them to go f*ck themselves. FOSS has also made it possible for these companies to design and sell $400 machines.
And the motivation for it all has not been that people begrudge Bill Gates his collection of 19th century gold plated toilet plungers, but the fact that people want choices and free markets in software and hardware. All Microsoft has to offer is a gigantic marketing budget and Stalinist central planning.
It worries me that the chipset consumes more power than the CPU itself. Since my
Thnkpad X40 sub note book is working just fine, I guess I'll hold off until the next revision of the Atom
platform is released and then reevaluate.
This works for me. If nothing better comes out in the next few weeks this or the MSI Wind is going back to school with my kids in the Fall.
It's small, cheap, light enough. It'll serve them all day. I don't have to freak out if they lose it or break it. It's got enough CPU power and memory to do real work.
I'll take one for me too. I'm tired of lugging around a full sized notebook when this is all I need. For real power and storage I can always remote to a real desktop under Citrix. For light spreadsheets and barcode scanning this will do the trick.
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The rate at which hardware prices are dropping is simply breathtaking. Consider it from the seller's angle: a $500 drop in price from say $1500 represents a 33% drop in revenue; a $500 drop in price from $1000, on the other hand, represents a 50% drop in revenue. This wreaks havoc on a lot of business models--and of course, creates a lot of new ones.
Looking at this price trend, it seems like every home will soon be littered with a lot of portables--some fairly new, others, say, one or two years old. There might be one on every coffee table, you might throw one in the bathroom, as well as the one in the bedroom, and so on. Managing and maintaining the software on all these devices will be a chore.
In an article I co-wrote for the FaunOS project project, we argue that making the boot device detachable and largely hardware agnostic is an attractive solution. The idea is that users carry and maintain only a single copy of an operating environment which they can run on pretty much any device of their choosing. That way, the user accumulates and maintains know-how on a single evolving operating environment rather than having to duplicate that effort across multiple machines. Does this makes sense?
What bothers me is that ASUS is no longer committed to Linux, and the 901 is the last Eee that will feature Linux as the preferred OS. I'm waiting for other companies to bring out an Atom, and also waiting for Ubuntu to finish their notepad version of 8.04 to run on one of these... which should be very soon.
Pretty close to ruined, I'd say. They get their first real PC at 2, by 13 they're expected to build their own. Cable broadband. This is pretty standard for our larger family - we're all in IT.
An Xbox with a couple games and controllers runs more than this and there's no way I'd buy them that.
I didn't say I'd be happy about it if their mini notebook was lost or trashed, but it wouldn't be a disaster. The first one that gets broken will just be another toy for me to play with the leftover bits. Motherboard? That looks like it would fit in an RC plane...
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Impressive specifications there. Y'know, I never knew anybody that thought he needed that much computer that also knew what to do with it when he got it.
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If I'm seven hours distant from a wall outlet what I want is not a mini laptop. What I need there is a fishing pole.
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except the part where these operations have to happen on your mini laptop. Have you not heard of Citrix? Remote Desktop? Cellular modems? It's possible to have all of this happening on your mainframe, the attached supercomputer cluster, and a few thousand desktops and access them all from the laptop referenced in the fine article via VPN tunnel over wireless modem, public wi-fi, hotel room Internet, or any other mode you choose. I actually do this all day.
I know of no reason why I'd need to debug an Oracle database, edit a photo for press, or update my CAD drawing while I was mid-stream fishing, nor while I was boarding a plane. For some things you just have to wade to shore, wait until the flight is airborne, pull up your pants. This laptop will not play consumer games nor will it run Vista well. If you want one that can join your AD domain you have to get the Linux one -- the XP home or Vista Basic one isn't up for that. For everything else, this laptop is fine.
There is no laptop that will impress your gamer friends. The minimum bar to clear there starts at a kilowatt. They're disgusting.
One more time... these things cost five hundred clams. They do all the stuff laptops do, including run business productivity apps. They're cute and they fit on the plane well. They last all day on one charge. They play media. They have USB ports . They have wireless. They support all of the remote desktop technologies you've ever heard of. They come with software that's truly free, and you can install as much more as you want for free via the Applications menu. They play video and audio. Your choice of operating systems are available. Some of them have firewire. FSM preserve us what the heck do you want from a mini laptop for a measly five Benjamins? Sex?
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