First Week with Asus Eee

I first heard about the Asus Eee minicomputer on Charlie Stross's Weblog. I said something to The Wife along the lines of, "Hey, look at how cool this is.  Maybe I'll pick one up after Christmas when the prices come down," and then promptly forgot all about it.

I've been working, playing, and living with one since my wife gave it to me on Christmas.  That's long enough to get a few general impressions about it and conclude, in summary, that's it's pretty freakin' awesome.  In no particular order:

• Size: It's small, and it's light.  Duh, that's pretty much the point.  But the implications of this took a while to sink in.  It's the size and weight of a trade paperback book.  I can downsize my messenger bag.  I can fit it into a coat pocket.  I'd thought my MacBook was the pinnacle of portability, but it still had a certain heft to it, and it wasn't something I'd take on, say, a hike through the White Mountains.  I probably wouldn't take the Asus through the White Mountains, either, but the point is, I could.  It weighs less than a canteen of water, even with the battery.  Typing on the keyboard is easier than I expected, too.  I did notice some slight wrist discomfort, but that was after using it to type in 6000 words of the second draft of my novel. 
• Display: I'd like it if the screen took up the whole front, rather than having those big speakers on the side.  The sound is excellent--better than my MacBook's internal speakers--but it's just not that common for me to listen to music on my computer without headphones.  The resolution, 800 x 460, is sufficient, though, and for applications that won't fit into that resolution, you can old down the Alt key and mouse drag windows beyond the edges of the screen.  I also suspect that the smaller screen improves
• Battery Life: substantially.  I get a little over three hours.  That's with the screen dimmed and the wireless networking turned off; otherwise it gives me 2.5 hours.  It's a small battery, though, and I'm hoping to track down a spare at some point for longer trips away from AC power.
• Performance: Much better than I was expecting.  It boots in under a minute, so powering down is more effective than sleep or hibernation.  Connecting to a wifi signal is a breeze.  The solid-state drive is extremely fast.  It's not a huge drive (although The Wife tracked down an 8 gig model about one nanosecond after they became available and a picosecond before they sold out), but the SD slot in the side opens it up for as much storage is I could possibly need for mobile computing.  The SD cards insert flush with the side of the case, so it's no problem to just stick one in there and leave it indefinitely.  The processor is a 900 MHz underclocked to somewhere around 600 MHz--apparently to deal with overheating issues from running them at full speed.  So I probably won't be doing any CGI rendering with it; neither will I be playing the Sims 2.  Which affects my life, at this particular point...not at all.
• Keyboard Glitch: I haven't heard about anyone else having this problem, so it was probably just my dumb luck.  The 'K' key was extremely sensitive.  Brush your fingers across the keyboard, you'd get a K.  Type a K, you'd get five Ks.  Type a J, I, L, or M, and the K would make an appearance as well.  I really didn't want to send it back (it was too cool, otherwise, for me to part with while waiting for a replacement), so I took matters into my own hands.  I pried the key off.  The contact beneath was just as sensitive--until I blew on it for all I was worth.  This is the Nintendo Generation's solution to electrical appliance malfunction.  Where our parents would fix misbehaving electrical devices with a hearty whack on the side, we grew up blowing into our cartridges and consoles when they wouldn't cooperate.  It worked, of course, and the key snapped back without a problem.
• Interface:  This is what's really cool.  Asus made a child-simple, idiot-proof, senior-citizen proof interface loaded with lots of basic applications, and they did it dirt-cheap by building on the free, open source Linux operating system.  Linux is usually very complicated, but they've done all the work tweaking it to handle all the hardware in this machine, and the computer is dirt-cheap because they didn't have to shell out for OS licenses.  However,
• Linux: is Open Source, which means that anyone who wants to copy and alter the operating system has to leave the source code open and available.  The result: by pressing Ctrl^Alt^T, you can open a "Terminal Window" (similar to a DOS command prompt in Windows) and tinker to your heart's content.  Tutorials online walked me through installing a more traditional desktop, getting me out of "Easy Mode" and getting me to a place where I could install Gimpshop (an open source Photoshop type image processing tool), a couple clever Linux puzzle games, and a basic text editor more to my liking than the bulky OpenOffice word processor.  I've been wanting to play with Linux for a long time and this computer gives me the excuse I've been waiting for.  The tutorials are a bit involved, but they're straightforward.  I'm actually a little surprised I haven't trashed my Operating System yet, but I understand there is an easy to use
• Recovery Feature: where the core factory install files are sequestered away from hackers and Linux n00bs getting in over their head.  In a worst-case scenario it's (supposedly) simple to get into the boot menu and, with a couple of keystrokes, restore it to the way it came out of the box.

Verdict?  I'd say track down one if you can.  I was expecting a nifty gadget to use in tandem with my regular laptop, and I certainly got that.  But this could very easily serve as someone's first computer, or their only computer.  For most of the stuff we need to do, we don't really need big drives and multichannel processors--particularly now that so many applications are being moved completely online.

Expect more outsider's reflections on Linux and OS wars in the near future.

 

Comments

[Chili]

Just ordered the 4G (w/ webcam)... I'll be sure to let you know how my wireless home media networking setup experiment goes.