When the EEE PC was first announced at last year’s Computex show in Taipei, it received a lot of attebtion, particularly because at that time, the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) initiative was gaining some momentum with Intel’s backing (Intel has since abandoned the effort). The EEE PC’s price, which was targeted to range from US$199 to US$399 at the time, has since risen to around US$250, along with changes to its initial specifications.
While there are three models listed on ASUS’s website, the one we received for testing is a 4G (Gigabyte) model. This machine is equipped with an Intel Celeron-M Ultra Low Voltage (ULV) 353 CPU which runs at 630 MHz. There is 512 MB of DDR2 RAM on-board which can be upgraded to 2GB using the single SODIMM slot. The 4GB flash memory drive contains a variant of the Xandros Linux distribution and this takes up nearly 2.5 GB, leaving around 1.5GB free for users.
The current generation of EEE PCs have a 7-inch LCD screen which supports a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels. The backlight can be adjusted via hotkey combinations and is sufficiently bright, although not under bright sunlight. The 80-key keyboard is expectedly small, but not to the extent of being unusable. The arrow keys are full sized but the touchpad is a tad small. Our unit has a VGA webcam installed (the 4G Surf model lacks this feature) and it even has a VGA out connector. Despite its small size, ASUS has not forgotten to include 3 USB 2.0 ports, an Ethernet port (the analogue modem port is sealed) and even a flash card reader.
As this product isn’t exactly a notebook, we didn’t run any benchmarks on it. We did however try to use it as we would a notebook - to browse the web, access documents and other files from an SD card. One gripe we have is the wireless configuration utility, which is not user friendly and took quite a bit of tinkering to get working. In addition, with only 480 horizontal lines, web browsing isn’t a very pleasant experience. We highly recommend doing it in full screen mode to avoid excessive scrolling. Battery life was around two and a half hours and the unit got quite uncomfortably hot at the bottom.
While we wouldn’t recommend the EEE PC to everyone on the street, some might find it useful as an Internet device, for light word processing or even as a presentation device. It isn’t cheap and the Linux OS restricts its usefulness. But then again, if you need something really portable, give the EEE PC a try. You might like it.
ASUS EEE PC on Youtube :
ASUS EEE PC Review on Youtube I :
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