REVIEW: The ASUS eeePC

I'm writing this on my brand new ASUS eeePC. This thing is pretty spiffy. They keyboard is, admittedly tiny, but certainly serviceable. With built-in wireless, OpeOffice.org and an easily available terminal (with SSH built in) this little baby rocks. It's got a solid state hard drive, which is great for battery life, as well as lightning-quick boot-ups. The downside of the solid state drive, tho, is the limited write lifetime of flash memory. This should be mitigated through judicious use of off-board flash drives.

I have to admit that I was a little uncertain, when I heard that ASUS has skipped over the normal “desktop” metaphor, but as someone who's worked ona variety of GUIs, going back to Tandy DeskMate and MS Windows 3.1, the tabbed “Program Manager” UI is a bit out-of-fashion, but perfetly apt for the screen resolution of the eeePC.

Once one gets past the seeming awkwardness of the tabbed app picker thing, the eeePC is a delight. The 900MHz Celeron, while not exactly super-computer-class hardware, is definitely adequate for mobile word-processing, web-browsing, emailing and so on. One should be prepared for a little reduction in desktoppiness in a tiny $350 potable computer, but this machine definitely delivers a good level of laptop capability in a super-portable very-well-built package at an outstanding price.

Oh, and the really great news is that this is one among an increasing class of OEM computers being marketed to consumers with Linux pre-installed. I bought two, and plan to use them in my DJ business, when I start it. I may get a couple more just to keep in my car and truck... 'cause you never know when you'll need to compute ;)

I was considering the iPod Touch and the Nokia N800 for quick and dirty internet access and SSH connectivity, but with the iPod in the $300-or-better neighborhood and the Nokia about the same, both with no keyboard, and the eeePC at $349, with basically everything I need in a laptop and not much bigger of a package than the Nokia... um... it was kind of a no-brainer. OK, the eeePC is bigger than either of the other two, but I don't need to carry a separate Bluetooth keyboard, and don't have to wait for Apple to open up their SDK, or risk bricking the stupid thing to put Linux on it. The eeePC has linux on it already (albeit Xandros), and if I want to put another distro on it, there's really nothing standing in my way. Having said that, i think I'll stick with the pre-installed software (at least for now), as it seems to have all the hardware stuff already worked out... like the Wi-Fi drivers, the function keys and power management... so...

The only gripes I have with it so far are:

• I can't seem to connect to NFS shares on my home network. Prolly something I'm doing wrong.
  
• I ran updates, which made Firefox segfault. I easily found a workaround on a forum (forum.eeeuser.com).
  

All-in-all, after a mere 4 hours of use, I give the eeePC a four and three-quarters stars out of five.

I'll see about udating this a little later, after I've have more time to put this little honey through its paces.

... A quick post script: laptop bags for a machine this tiny are a little tough to come by, but portable DVD player bags work great. The CompUSA near me is going out of business, and I managed to pick up 2 such bags for $.98 each!!!!!