olivetalks

And it’s so cute!

Right, what a girlie comment to say. I mean, it is a laptop, woman, not a puppy!

Yeah, so it has another positive thing besides being cute, it does not lick you!

This is a post about the tiny Asus laptops for all audiences. Check what is the first question that pops in your head when you hear someone say “I just bought myself an EEE” and you will know the group you belong to:

1. eee… eeeh… what?
2. wow! so, is it as cool as they say it is?
3. I see, so which one did you get? what are the full specs? Anything else I should know about that model?

The answers for the eee… eeeh… what? people:

This is an Asus Eee laptop.

Well, not any Eee laptop, but our own Eee PC Yup, the pen is also mine and it shows you how tiny the Eee is And it weighs less than a kilo and a minute after taking it out of the box, you can already start working (with OpenOffice.org or GoogleDocs or Paint…), surfing the net (Firefox is there, Skype, Pidgin -the Linux MSN equivalent-, and Thunderbird as well) or even playing solitaire or with a Mr. Potato. And why did we buy it you ask? Well, it will be a better traveling companion than my 3 kg laptop which makes me walk around airports worse than the Hunchback of Notre-Dame did. Oh and the first answer I gave my mother when she asked the same question is also true: because… they had it in the shop…

The answers for the wow! so, is it as cool as they say it is? people:

Yup! So far… Do you want the pros and the cons? Ok:

Pros:

1. Yes, it weighs less than 1 kg.
2. The 7′ screen although small, actually displays a lot more/better than I expected.

   

3. Setting it up is like no time. Seriously, I think it took us about 2 minutes to be at the screen where you can open Firefox already.
4. The kiddo-laptop connected to wireless without a glitch and we were able to download and install the newer version of skype (to be able to use the built-in camera) within a minute.
5. If yous mess up the system, you can restore the whole laptop back to factory settings in under two minutes. In jkOnTheRun they even have a video showing you how quick it is!
6. It boots in 30 seconds and powers off in 12! Yes, I timed both processes.

Cons:

1. The keyboard IS small. I have problems most of all with pressing the Shift button. Look at the following image:

   

   You can see how small the keyboard is, compared to a “normal-size” one. I have placed a 1 cent coin on the letter D on both keyboards so you can see the relative sizes better. Oh, the mouse is a small-mouse as well (which did not come with the Eee).

2. ZoltarStark thinks the display organization with the buttons in the main screen to open Firefox, Spreadsheets, etc is not very efficient if you’re a power user since you need to point and click instead of selecting items from a menu.

   

3. The laptop seems to be designed with Windows users in mind and it has the same folder architecture as Windows Explorer with My documents folder and so on set up by default. Even worse, though, is that it asks you to reboot the laptop after every software update, like Microsoft does. Then again, with a total of 40 seconds required per reboot, it’s not as bad as it could be.

The answers for the I see, so which one did you get? what are the full specs? Anything else I should know about that model? people:

We bought the Asus Eee PC 4G. For those of you that don’t know the difference between the Eee versions, check out this table. As a summary, all four models have a 7′ display and Linux pre-installed (with the number of software applications varying depending on the disk size), Ethernet, WLAN, built-in speaker and microphone, and weigh 0.92 kg. They all have three USB 2.0 ports and a MMC/SD (HC) card reader slot. Furthermore:

Model name	Eee PC 2G Surf	Eee PC 4G Surf	Eee PC 4G	Eee PC 8G
Processor	800 MHz Intel Cele	900 MHz Intel Cel
RAM	512 MB	512 MB	512 MB	1 GB
Total storage space	2 GB	4 GB	4 GB	8 GB
Empty storage space	400 MB	1.4 GB	1.4 GB	5.1 GB
Camera	No	No	Yes	Yes

Plus, the RAM of the 4G and 8G models can be upgraded up to 2GB! We got it from a German PC shop for 300 EUR which we found quite cheap, as some shops in Amazon ask for that price for the 2G Surf model. The catch of course is that we got it with the OS in German, as well as the keyboard. BUT, it took us two minutes to change the OS to UK English and another minute for the keyboard. You can see the instructions of how to do both things here. After these changes, the OS and most software programs (like Firefox and OpenOffice.org) appear in English (or whatever language you choose). A few stayed in German, but I don’t mind having Acrobat Reader in German (yes, Acrobat is the default PDF reader installed!). And as long as you don’t look at the keys, you can pretend you are using a UK keyboard no problem .Summary? I am glad I did not buy the Surf versions and I might regret not having waited for the 8G version, for the extra default RAM and storage space, but right now, I really like this Eee. As a side laptpop, it is useful to run for example Skype in it while using your main PC to work, so Skype does not use all the CPU in your main computer as it sometimes does. As a main laptop… probably only when traveling. I will be spending some hours working on it in a couple of weeks, so I will come back with a report then.

Update (17th April 2008): A review just came out on the “big” brother of the Asus Eee 7″ laptop, the Asus Eee PC 900 (as in 8.9″ ~ 9 inch screen). It seems it has the same CPU, but 1GB of RAM to start with, and 20GB of storage if you buy the version running Linux (there is Eee 900 version running Windows XP, for the same price, that has 12 GB of space instead). I am starting to save to get my ASUS 700 Eee a big brother