Will Asus' $499 notebook mark the age of the throw away PC?
As of December 1 you'll be able to buy Asus' Eee PC baby notebook from Myer of all places, which gives you an idea of the target market.
Weighing in at 920 grams, with a 7 inch display, the Eee PC would seem the perfect 'gadget on the go' for some people - assuming they've got small fingers. Just don't ask what's under the bonnet.
You need to wade through a lot of gushing prose to find any information about what makes the Eee PC tick. It seems there are four models, with up to 1GB of RAM and up to 8GB solid state hard drive, but Asus only lists the processor as "Intel CPU and chipset". The fact Asus doesn't want to talk about the power plant is a bad sign and any idiot who buys a computer without knowing the processor speed deserves what they get.
A quick Google search reveals the Eee PC runs on a 900MHz Celeron. If it was running Vista this would be a joke, even under XP it would be sluggish, but the Eee PC comes with Xandros Linux pre-installed - which one would assume is less resource-hungry than Microsoft's bloatware. I've dabbled with Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon on my ThinkPad T60 and have been less than impressed with the result, but some of that is due to hardware issues. A Linux distro already optimised for the hardware would obviously offer a better user experience. Apparently the Eee PC is also XP-compatible, with an XP version expected to be released soon.
All four models feature 802.11b/g wifi, Ethernet and a solid state hard drive but no optical drive. Disappointingly it seems Australia is only getting one of the low-end models - the Eee PC 4G Surf. It's only got 512MB of RAM which is soldered in so it can't be upgraded. The hard drive is only 4GB and there's no webcam.
[Correction: Australia is getting the Eee PC 701 4G, which has a webcam and upgradeable RAM]
Considering you can get the 8GB model with 1GB of RAM and webcam for around $US400, Australian's are entitled to ask why they should pay more for a lower-spec model. You can expect plenty of Aussies to buy their Eee PC online from the States.
It's impossible to pass judgement on the Eee PC until I put one through its paces. You'd suspect the Eec PC to be a cheap and nasty piece of plastic junk that will fall apart after a few bumps, but early reports say otherwise. Of course at these prices you'd throw it away after 12 months and buy a new one anyway.
What are your expectations of the Eee PC? Is it a novelty, or the future of mobile computing?
Source: http://blogs.smh.com.au/gadgetsonthego/archives/2007/11/asus_eee_pc_the_disposal_compu.html
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