First Full Review of New Asus Eee PC 900 266
An anonymous reader writes "After months of rumors, the new 8.9in screen Eee PC is out in the open and the first review is online. As well as the larger screen you get 1GB RAM, 20GB Storage and a multi-touch touchpad. It costs more than the old Eee PC, but it definitely sounds like it's worth the extra cash." I always thought the appeal of the original was the ridiculously low price, coupled with the ease of hacking. Not sure if the sequel will meet that challenge.
Asus Competitors Competitors (Score:4, Insightful)
They all seem to have pretty close pricing, for example the HP's 2133:
While it may not be the year of Linux on the desktop, it's certainly the year of Linux on the super freaking tiny notebook that is difficult to type on (yes, I know what a USB keyboard is).
Re:the photos (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Multi Touch (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Multi Touch (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:the photos (Score:5, Insightful)
I dare say you have completely missed the point of this device. The whole point is that it's not "full-sized".
Re:Battery life is a major downside (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, how many people are buying this as a full time alternative to a full sized laptop?
I think we're still in the early adopter stage -- where most of the people who are buying it are just curious. Therefore it may be more important to meet certain psychological pricing benchmarks (e.g. it's closer to 300 Euros than 400) than it is to put a bigger battery in it. Then the people who find it seriously useful will buy a second battery, or a larger aftermarket battery.
Admit it; you've bought things on impulse for X dollars, then on impulse bought a Y dollar ugprade for those things, even though you probably wouldn't consider paying X + Y for the entire rig and it was just wishful thinking you didn't need the upgrade. That normal economic behavior for early adopters.
When the thing gets to the point where pragmatists are buying them, you can bet they'll sport much longer battery lives. Just the volumes they'll be buying parts in will bring the price down to stay "cheap".
Re:Wrong (Score:2, Insightful)
And the size is a real winner, I for one have to carry a whole load of other crap about with me, and I have to carry it on the tube at rush-hour.
That said, I've not got one and Im not going to die from caring the standard laptop either. This model is capable of being a good replacement to a laptop, but with such a small screen i think ill keep my crappy laptop.
Re:HPC Pro does the trick better. (Score:5, Insightful)
I know just how terribly unresponsively it performs.
I know how terribly limited the selection of available software is
I know how crippled all the "pocket" apps are.
I know just how completely lacking external hardware drivers (eg. printers) are.
If you need more than something that just barely lets you type basic documents and sync them with your desktop, WinCE is a lame duck.
The HPC form-factor is quite nice, but the realities of using one for any length of time is not so pleasant.
Re:Evangelize (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:yeah... just install XP (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Battery life is a major downside (Score:3, Insightful)
If they wanted battery life they should have ditched the Intel Inside sticker and stuck an ARM in, even one fabbed by Intel. Escept for leaning really hard on Adobe to give them a Flash Player port everything else they shipped on the original eeepc would have rebuilt with few problems.
This one has some things going for it, although the original WOW feature in the first product announcement for me last year was that $200 pricetag. I said at the time that smelled of bait and switch, looks like I was right. Can't argue too much though since they are selling every unit they can build and ship at these higher prices for now. Perhaps they will go for the low end of the market when production capacity catches up to demand. Or perhaps they will leave that segment for someone else.
The best reason to go after the $250 market is that with luck we won't get bait/switched on Linux. Oh course we now know that the real price a large OEM pays for Windows is about the same as the wholesale price of a single 8GB flash chip.
Hard drive wouldn't make sense. (Score:3, Insightful)
For something like the Eee, I think flash is entirely appropriate, and 20GB is a good bunch of storage for a small machine like this.
If you need the 300GB, you could get a USB powered external disk and plug it in to watch your seasons on the go.
Not every product is going to be perfect for everyone, and your claim of trading 512MB RAM for a huge ass hard disk doesn't jive with this product.
Re:Evangelize (Score:3, Insightful)
Who'd have thought that one company actually *doing* something could evangelize linux better than a million geeks screaming at each other through the ether...
All it needs now is for *one* major game developer to port their games to linux and "Linux on the Desktop" might cease to be an oxymoron. (valve is the obvious one for me. They're obviously not going to port every game, but with steam you would get to see all they have at once.) Of course it would kill some people to use a closed source app on their shiny OS OS, but with ubunutu pulling people (particularly teens) in from the mainstream, their injection of open-mindedness might make it a viable business model now where it wasn't 3 years ago.