Yesterday, I picked up an Asus Eee, despite the news that the XO laptop will be crossing the border this weekend. So why did I get the Asus Eee anyway?
- I went to look at the Eee last weekend, and it’s much smaller than my Toshiba M300, which is about the same size as the XO.
- I’m sick and can’t sculpt, so this is a great time for me to play with computers instead
- I want to give myself time to become accustomed to the keyboard before next week, when I plan to take it with me when I go to Toronto for work later this month.
- I want to try manipulating, or at least neutralizing, Murphy’s Law on the delivery of my XO by buying an Eee.
- I want one!
The Asus Eee is tiny…about the size of a hardcover book or paper notebook (pictures below). It comes with a carrying sleeve into which it fits very snuggly, and an AC adapter which is about the size of a cell phone adapter (and even has folding prongs!). The startup and shutdown times are amazing. Including the time it takes me to input the BIOS password which I had set for it, I clocked the startup time to be 29 seconds. I didn’t even bother to clock the shutdown time, but I would say it took less than 5 seconds.
The keyboard is small, but manageable. Like any keyboard on a computer, it takes a while to get used to where the non-character keys have been placed. To conserve space, many of the keys serve dual purposes via the Fn key. I’m composing this post on the Eee and it took a while to become accustomed to how close the apostrophe is to the Enter key, and how hard I have to hit the period and “c” keys to get them to register.
Connecting to my wireless LAN was painless, and the Eee auto-detects the WEP type and saves the key (I can’t get OpenSUSE to remember the WEP key for my connection, so it’s a relief to not need to enter that every time for the Eee). The screen size is usable, but obviously no match for a full-sized laptop. Photos can be viewed easily in the Eee, but I wouldn’t bother trying to edit them on the Eee because of the screen size. There are also merely paint programs pre-loaded, and nothing like GIMP or Photoshop, although I’m sure I can install GIMP onto this if I cared to.
The Eee recognized my Logitech Revolution X-somethingorother immediately, and didn’t require me to configure it. The only downfall is not all of the buttons are usable. I couldn’t get them all to work in OpenSUSE either, so I don’t miss the non-standard ones. USB drives and SD cards took a moment longer on the Eee than on OpenSUSE to be recognized. Once recognized, I am presented with what now seems to be a standard window across several OSs which gives me different options for how I want to view the files.
The one thing which concerns me is the heat of the device. Many other users have reported that it becomes warmer than other laptops, and many of those reports came from bloggers who viewed the Eee in a showroom and assumed the temperature was a result of the computer being on all day. After about a half hour of use, the temperature became noticeably warm, although I have not heard of any overheating and/or exploding.
I have not yet tested the webcam feature, or had time to mess around with the OS very much. I’m too dazzled by how small it is and how well it performs regular functions.
There were two odd things I noticed. The first is the Eee does not have an external control for the speakers’ volume. Luckily, there is no startup chime. The other is the Eee comes with the standard port for laptop locks. I don’t know who would actually use it, because it would be much safer to take the laptop with you when you consider the size.
Now I’m going to work on a slightly crazy and what I think to be a very cool idea for a laptop case for the Eee.
Tags:
asus eee,
computers,
technology,
xo laptop
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