There’s usually an easy way to estimate the price of a notebook computer. Very small or very large notebooks tend to be expensive, with cheaper models occupying the middle ground.
The Asus Eee PC, then, is something of an anomaly: a truly tiny computer, with a tiny £220 price tag to match.
The Eee PC really is miniscule, weighing just 927g. The lid of the PC is only a little larger than a DVD case, and when closed it’s around one inch thick. Open the lid, though, and you’ll find everything you’d expect from a larger notebook. There’s a full Qwerty keyboard, touchpad, 7in colour LCD and even a VGA webcam.
The specification inside is rather more unusual. The Eee PC uses a 900MHz Intel Mobile Celeron processor clocked down to run at just 630MHz, along with 512MB of Ram and a 4GB flash hard drive. Over 2GB of this is used up as standard, but it’s easy to add more space with an SD card.
This specification won’t get the best out of Vista, so Asus has wisely decided to ship the computer with a version of Xandros Linux instead. This boots in around 15 seconds, and uses a custom tab-based user interface. It allows the user to launch applications by selecting a tab, such as Internet, and then a task.
Applications are given friendly names - Web rather than Firefox, for example - so the whole system is very easy to use. Other useful applications installed as standard include Open Office 2, Thunderbird and a media player. More technically minded users will like the ease with which a full KDE desktop can be uncovered. Asus knows Linux is one step too far for many users, so it has included Windows XP drivers. Armed with a USB CD-Rom drive and a copy of XP, it took us around two hours to load XP.
With Windows XP installed, PCmark05 wouldn’t produce a full result but the hard drive section’s score of 1,907 is on a par with slower 2.5in mechanical hard disks. It’s powerful enough to play DivX movies smoothly and the stereo speakers deliver the punch of bigger notebooks.
Using Linux as standard, though, the Eee PC works well as an internet device. Its built-in Ethernet and 802.11b/g Wifi makes it easy to connect to a network, although we found ourselves wishing for a Bluetooth adapter so we could connect to a mobile phone too.
The 800x480 pixel screen is good enough to view most websites without excessive scrolling, especially if you hit F11 for the full-screen mode. Firefox makes short work of most sites, including media-heavy ones such as Youtube, and we found that having a few tabs open didn’t tax the Eee PC’s memory or processor too much.
As a tool for office work, though, the Eee is less convincing. Open Office works well but the keyboard will be a sticking point for many. It’s necessarily small, but even once you’ve mastered the two-finger typing technique that’s necessary to type quickly - it took us a day or two - the keys are fragile-feeling and wobbly. It is fine for an email, but we wouldn’t want to type more than 1,000 words in one go.
More annoyingly, the battery lasted between two and three hours in our tests. With such a small screen and slow processor, we’d hoped for a longer lifespan when away from the mains.
Despite these niggles, it’s hard not to fall for the Eee PC’s diminutive charms. It isn’t a suitable replacement for a proper notebook when working, but as a second device to surf the web, or as the ultimate geek-toy for Linux fans, it’s ideal.
