Just What is this ASUS Eee Thing Anyway? 401
davidmwilliams writes "ASUS have released a cheap subnotebook. It is far from state-of-the-art tech-wise, with 512Mb RAM and a Celeron processor. It has a 4Gb hard drive and no optical drive. Its screen is 7" and runs at the odd resolution of 800x480 and the operating system looks like something Fisher Price might have designed. Why would you buy it? What on earth can you do with this?" I've been wondering this myself given the huge coverage in the media of this thing.
Tons of Potential (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been wondering this myself given the huge coverage in the media of this thing.
Believe it or not, the "huge media coverage" that I've noticed of this thing has only been on Slashdot. Other than that, it's a big name manufacturer, in our world it's huge news.
It's great (Score:4, Interesting)
Keeping it light, in both weight and bootup times means it's a great companion to my main dev laptop (Dell M something) that takes an age till it's usuable with all the dev tools/sql servers it loads up. It barely takes up anymore room in my laptop bag, so if I need to check something quick, that comes out, boots in 30 seconds and is good to go on a wireless connection rather than dragging out my main machine.
I love it. Screen is a
Tempted to get a white one for the kitchen area, just to have vids playing whilst at the breakfast bar, music playing whilst cooking, or whatever.
9.5/10
Weight, apps available... (Score:4, Interesting)
I personally have a PepperPad 3 that I use while travelling. It came down to weight and the apps available (such as OO.org, Thunderbird/Sunbird, etc.).
I do a lot of travelling and lugging a 6 pound laptop w/accessories through airports sucks. With a fully functional Linux distro on my PP3, I can now use a much smaller messenger bag, and everything, including full-sized external keyboard and mouse, weighs in at less than 3 pounds. And it does everything I need it to while travelling.
What this little machine is.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Seems to me I remember the day when a 640K operating system and a 40Meg disk were king, so having 1.5 Gig left over to play with after the OS is loaded --that's like luxury space. Oh, and I can go back and get more permanent memory if I delete some stuff if won't ever use, can add and subtract multiple versions of multi-gigabyte portable (SD) memory, and if I use a USB Wifi stick, I can connect even to the web at pretty good speed?
What this thing is is portable. Medium powered. Flexible. Ideal for a Linux person like me who would like to have a road warrior unit he can live with -- without the backache.
Re:What can you do with it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Inexpensive Toy (Score:2, Interesting)
Boot from anything; run REAL Linux distros (Score:2, Interesting)
I dont like loose appendices but the SD card slot is very good, I purchased four 16GB Patriot SDHC cards, and installed four different operating systems on each of them. True, I spent more on these cards than on the eee itself, but I have a functionality regular laptops do not have. My favorite is Ubuntu 7.10 with lots of physics and biology apps (5.4GB used for installation). I also hacked a Win XP disk and managed to put XP on another SD card, but it is slower than linux. The interesting part is that I do not use the internal SSD for booting anything, just for storage.I HATE Xandros, the first thing I did was to erase it.
Fast and Cheep, but not Powerful??? (Score:3, Interesting)
Aaaaargh (Score:2, Interesting)
"Look! It comes in pink! It's so SMALL and CUTE! Aren't they cool? Are they any good? I bought two of them..."
She's now pestering me to buy one for every mobile user because their (dual-core, 2 GB, 7200 RPM, DVD-R, 1600x1280 Latitude D830) laptops are "too heavy". Except she doesn't like the operating system and wants XP on them all. I'm now in the process of tactfully telling her that this is not going to happen... it'd be worse than the f***ing Blackberries they keep buying and expecting us to fix.
Re:I played with one yesterday (Score:3, Interesting)
Translation: Cheap fun for people who are willing to work with a soldering iron. There is not much room inside, but folks are already modding the laptop to add more 'disk' in the form of hand made USB adapters to SD cards internally! The laptop is small, but the mainboard is not so miniaturized that one can't measure/modify the circuits. As a bonus - it cost so little (for this sort of hardware) - it is worth risking letting the magic out.
I'm planning to roll it out for a hospital (Score:5, Interesting)
IT usage is about 60% for the in-patients; but less than 12% for out-patients. The problem? Doctors are fed up with using PCs - Windows or Linux. Some of their biggest complaints:
1. Long boot time; Linux is only slightly better here; and Vista is downright pathetic and consequently been banned. The EEE PC boots up in less than 20 seconds and the GUI is immediately functional. No need for any useless login, active desktop, active directory etc.
2. Ultra portable - so the doctor can carry it to the wards and rooms; and dictate into it when necessary. Very cumbersome with laptops; tablets are better; but very expensive compared to the EEE (1:8).
3. Wakes up from suspend in less than 2 seconds - unparalleled.
4. The interface is very user friendly and makes sense without training - unlike Windows.
Surprisingly, this is still not widely avbl in India. Ingram Micro is getting it in the 3rd week of Jan. as I hear. We are ordering about 120 units for our doctors; who are genuinely thrilled with a computer for the first time in their lives.
****
A second appln. is for an e-governance system whereby citizens apply for assistance - there are about a dozen welfare schems like for handicapped, destitutes, old age pension, widow pension etc. The EEE PC is much more functional than a laptop and can be easily carried to the villages by trained self-help-group women assistants. The e-governance appln. is a web-enabled semi-offline-capable system; so even if there is no broadband; the locally installed LAMP appln. gives a very similar look-and-feel; once in a few days it gets synced with the main server.
Being about 25% of the price and weight of a laptop makes the EEE PC very handy for both these situations.
Re:What can you do with it? (Score:5, Interesting)
I can text message with my phone (ATT Tilt), but the EEE makes slashdot doable, and the web in general a lot more pleasant than it was on the 810.
Eee? Bah, Pandora FTW (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I'm planning to roll it out for a hospital (Score:3, Interesting)
The new HMIS appln. is completely web enabled and built on Ruby on Rails. Users login through the browser before they can access the data.... but doctors prefer to even skip that and want to get direct access to their web apps after launching the browser.
So now, instead of cookies we're trying to get the mac address of the connected PC to determine which doctor is trying to access the appln; and then directly serve the page. Of course, we ensure that the IP address belongs to the hospital LAN before doing so.
Re:MacBook eee ThinkPad, according to Google (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Tons of Potential (Score:4, Interesting)
Or a useful tool.
We've just put 20 of them out in the field with a custom app for some of our data collectors. They're doing a fine job at a fraction of the price of a UMPC.
Re:What can you do with it? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've got a Zaurus - the C3200 model - and an Asus Eee. The Zaurus is way better than any phone or PDA that I've used, as it really was the miniature laptop that a lot of people were looking for. However, compared to the Eee it's not so hot. The keyboard is really difficult to use, and the lack of power from the USB port means you need a powered hub to use an external keyboard. The available Linux distros for the Zaurus have small developer teams and are very unstable - they generally turn my machine into a brick whenever I try to configure wireless networking or perform an update. The Eee on the other hand has a usable keyboard, Pentium processor and conventional BIOS. This means a plain x86 Linux distro or BSD will install and run on the machine with no difficulty. The Xandros based distro that the Eee comes with is very nice when you actually use it rather than just criticising it based on the desktop theme as some people have done, and it's easy to strip the machine down if you want to (my Eee now runs NetBSD for example).
Re:They had something better. (Score:3, Interesting)
As for the Apple 'bought' the OS from Xerox idea, consider: Apple's 1983 Lisa was a huge leap past anything delivered by Xerox and was about half the price of the Star machines Xerox half-assedly tried to sell in the early 80s. The Mac was another big leap over the Lisa in UI, although it greatly simplified the sophistication of the underlying OS in order to deliver an environment that could run on consumer-priced hardware in 1984. Apple clearly led UI development through the mid 80s, and nothing was even close. This was because it had invested + $60 million into UI and OS development.
On the cheap, Microsoft tried to offer a clone of the Mac environment running on far inferior IBM PC hardware - which had only ever been designed to run text-based DOS. Apple delivered highly customized hardware designed expressly to run a graphical environment. Even if Apple and Microsoft both had equal resources, getting a Mac-like GUI to run on a PC would have been impossibly more difficult. Apple was making money selling hardware, while giving away its software. Microsoft was only making money on software, so cutting corners and shipping an unfinished product was in Microsoft's best interests.
The market wasn't sophisticated enough to understand the difference between a custom OS running on purpose-built hardware and a kluge running on DOS running on crap PC hardware of the day. The tech press only reported that both had a pointer, mouse, and icons.
1985's Windows 1.0 wasn't sold until after John Sculley licensed Apple's technology to Microsoft (in exchange for 2 years of Excel on the Mac). That turned out to be a bad deal. The idea that Apple fell from the lead because it "didn't license its OS" is a bit of a mistake, because Apple did license it, it just did it in a really stupid fashion that lost control of its own technology.
Windows wasn't EVER pre-installed on a PC until 3.x arrived in 1990, SIX YEARS after the Mac arrived. PC hardware makers were all upset that they couldn't compete against Apple's Macs by selling dumb DOS PCs, so they pushed Microsoft to give them a rip off copy that could make their shoddy hardware look as good. Apple didn't market its machines, didn't retail them properly, and therefore couldn't handle the balloon of PC clones that appeared running a fake copy.
Still, nobody EVER claimed that Windows was even close to the Mac until the end of 1995, MORE than a FULL DECADE after the Mac arrived. Other companies actually delivered credible competition: Amiga shipped interesting hardware acceleration technology and OS improvements, but Jobs' NeXT really blew past the Mac back in 1988, YEARS before anyone really began using Windows.
NeXT's OS was far ahead of the Mac, and layered on additional sophistication in the UI. THREEE YEARS LATER, Microsoft announced it was going to deliver Cairo and match all the features in NeXTSTEP. Never did. Ended up pooping out a revision of Windows 3.x that copied lots of ideas from NeXT's UI FOUR YEARS LATER. It also delivered a "server/workstation" OS that was largely unusable throughout the 90s. I know, I was an NT admin through 2001. NT was famous for needing a reboot every few weeks to prevent a lockup. It was crap for SEVEN YEARS. These are LONG PERIODS OF TIME.
After owning the market with shitty products for well over a decade, Microsoft used its fabulous wealth to half-assedly squirt out minor updates to DOS/Windows and then released a usable version of NT in 2000, and a consumer version in 2001 with XP. SEVEN YEARS LATER they polished that but the market doesn't give a shit.
The state of the art is now being delivered by the same comp
Re:Tons of Potential (Score:2, Interesting)