Eee PC… quick look

Below is my hand on an actual Asus Eee PC (or is it EeePC?). The local Microcenter here has them. I love that store for what they have, but it’s hard to shop there when you can get a better deal online. That blasted cost of having a storefront…

Anyway, I would like to have a secondary laptop. And to be honest, the Macbook Air almost fits the bill. It needs to sport a 9-10″ screen and be about $1000 cheaper. It is far too overpriced for a secondary machine. I’ll let the rich folk subsidize it (not that Apple will ever likely reduce the cost anytime soon). But all the so called “UMPC’s” aren’t that much better. They come in at maybe a grand for the base model, but can jump past an Air as well. This is where Asus comes in. This sucker is relatively cheap and easy to have around the house and on the go.

I’ll start off with the bad points. The screen is too small. The new 8.9″ one is perfect in size for my needs though. The offbeat 800×480 is cumbersome for the web. While I did not get to try the web browser out, it’s pretty simple to mimic at home. It sucks.

The keyboard is too small. I can’t comfortably type. I hit enter all too often when reaching for the apostrophe. And backspace is a chore to hit as well because of it’s tiny size. It’s a little cheap feeling, but that’s expected, and it didn’t bother me at all. The touchpad was small, but managable. The right/left click were annoying to use because of both size and an attempt to have a one piece rocker (looks like one button, but really two).

It was also a little heavier than I had expected. And was hot as hell (but it was sitting there on display, all day long). That’s pretty much it for the downsides.

On the up side, Firefox loaded up quickly, faster dare I say it than my iMac (2.16ghz/3GB). By a hair. I could not test much though because I didn’t feel like trying to get a rep to give me the WEP/WPA key. Open Office Write opened up very fast too, leaps and bounds faster than Office 2008 on my iMac. Aside from the keyboard issues, it’s a nice little place to type up whatever you want.

The OS itself is clean, and has nice big icons. Organization could use some work. Like wifi settings should be under system preferences, not under Internet (where pidgin and firefox and google links are). The dialog boxes scream Windows XP, heh. I’m not sure I’d bother with another distro, but I’d have to use it more. The speakers are surprisingly good given their size. They still suck, but I was expecting far less.

That’s it for now. I should say that this is a very brief “first look.” I couldn’t really test using it much, I was at the display for 15 minutes. It’s very easy to quickly pick out the bad things because we come in with certain expectations, and usually mine are a bit unrealistic/too hopeful. It is a very nice size to just grab and throw in your bag. Sit back at Starbucks and check a few emails, write a page in your book, whatever. But that means for you guys, you’d have to have a man bag. That is the beauty of the iPhone… but you can’t do any work with it. And I refuse to jump to AT&T.

It’s a nice toy, and I would not pay more than $300 for it. Mainly because it doesn’t feel like it should be more than that. I’d up it to $400 for the new larger screen. But even so, they keyboard makes it hard to type. And if that kills it, I would much rather have an iPod touch. This would have been perfect in college though.