Early Look At ASUS Eee PC 901 With Intel Atom CPU 235
Might E. Mouse writes "Reviews are hitting the net for the first Intel Atom-powered netbooks, and TrustedReviews has posted one for the ASUS Eee PC 901 20G Linux Edition. Has ASUS won the Atom(ic) war before it even started? With features like Wireless-N and a 6600mAh battery good for four to seven hours, that might well be the case. TR rated it highly, but I'm going to wait for their MSI Wind review before making a purchase — their first look at the Wind showed a better keyboard and larger storage."
An anonymous reader notes that despite the increased capabilities, the 901 debuts at a lower cost than its predecessor.
settling dust - I'll wait a year (Score:5, Insightful)
FOSS is working as intended (Score:5, Insightful)
FOSS has made it possible to create these machines and circumvent Microsoft's near monopoly, because if any of these companies had asked Microsoft to keep XP going for ultralights, Microsoft would have told them to go f*ck themselves. FOSS has also made it possible for these companies to design and sell $400 machines.
And the motivation for it all has not been that people begrudge Bill Gates his collection of 19th century gold plated toilet plungers, but the fact that people want choices and free markets in software and hardware. All Microsoft has to offer is a gigantic marketing budget and Stalinist central planning.
Outdated chipset (Score:5, Insightful)
Thnkpad X40 sub note book is working just fine, I guess I'll hold off until the next revision of the Atom
platform is released and then reevaluate.
Still one thing missing... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:settling dust - I'll wait a year (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:FOSS is working as intended (Score:3, Insightful)
We know how much Microsoft and Intel tried to stop the OLPC project...
Re:"A full school day" (Score:5, Insightful)
This works for me. If nothing better comes out in the next few weeks this or the MSI Wind is going back to school with my kids in the Fall.
It's small, cheap, light enough. It'll serve them all day. I don't have to freak out if they lose it or break it. It's got enough CPU power and memory to do real work.
I'll take one for me too. I'm tired of lugging around a full sized notebook when this is all I need. For real power and storage I can always remote to a real desktop under Citrix. For light spreadsheets and barcode scanning this will do the trick.
Sometimes I feel old... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why a VGA port? (Score:3, Insightful)
Eee PC regrettably still lacks a touchscreen (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone coming e.g. from a Psion or Nokia Communicator will know what a difference a touchscreen makes on small devices, and would surely have appreciated it at least as an option.
Re:FOSS is working as intended (Score:3, Insightful)
Why wouldn't you put a different CPU in an UMPC? Sure, an Atom CPU is low-power, but it's also held back by the x86 architecture. Drop that, and you lose binary compatibility (a small loss for this application) in exchange for even better battery life. An UMPC based on ARM, Mips or low-power PPC core could be even more awesome than one based on Atom.
I can understand that people want x86 compatibility, even for a small UMPC running Linux. But with this market exploding, I'm sure there is (or will be) room for a niche market of non-x86 UMPC's. Let's hope some manufacturer steps in there.
Re:Outdated chipset (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, a lower wattage chipset would give you more, but what exactly is there to worry about?
Sure, a lower wattage chipset would give you more, but what exactly is there to worry about?
same amount of your hard earned money for an ultra portable that had maybe 14 hours or more of battery life.
Imagine that. A sub note with close to 20 hours battery life, much like the Tandy 100.
As of now, the Intel Atom is mated to a 3-4(?) year old 945 chipset. Sounds like something was missed here.
A ferrari to get to the store (Score:5, Insightful)
Impressive specifications there. Y'know, I never knew anybody that thought he needed that much computer that also knew what to do with it when he got it.
Re:Why a VGA port? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Cheapening the masses (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:FOSS is working as intended (Score:4, Insightful)
Sell THAT idea to people who want the convenience of running the same binaries on all their machines.
What do you think makes small x86 computers so popular?
Re:Why a VGA port? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's insanely stupid.
It sounds really stupid to me to have a DVI port, and not a VGA port. Why? Because there's a lot more VGA compatible hardware out their than their is DVI compatible hardware.
The small advantage of slightly better graphics output doesn't really outweigh the disadvantage of having to either have an adapter (that people will likely forget or lose), or use a display that supports DVI.
Re:Quality. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:ASUS not committed to Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately doesn't work like that (Score:3, Insightful)
Changing the north and south bridges might increase the battery life by perhaps 20%, depending on the attached peripherals, but it will not double or triple it. In fact, even this may be wrong; you do not know how efficient the chipset is already, and it may not be possible to reduce the power significantly.
No "ASUS" logo on the case. (Score:3, Insightful)
My opinion? DUMB! ASUS are having the much-envied iPod moment - and they're just throwing it out of the window. The Eee PC is doing/could have done wonders for ASUS' brand name, just as iPod did for Apple's. Too afraid of success, I guess? Nicer/safer to be a mediocrity?
For the record, I am a very satisfied Eee PC 701 user. Toss it into my backpack and go riding my bike to the uni - can't even feel the little critter.
Re:"A full school day" (Score:4, Insightful)
The closest thing I'll have to a laptop is a PDP11 with a card reader velcroed to the side. Does that make my dick bigger than yours?
Some people actually use the CPU, ya know (Score:3, Insightful)
Even my old mom is into digital photos as a hobby. And I don't mean just taking the photos, but serious heavy duty filtering and processing too. Yeah, she could go do something else while those finish, but in practice that's not half as much fun. Waiting for a computer to finish something is, funnily enough, a lot more annoying than doing it by hand in 20 times the time. Because it's time when you do nothing but wait.
Plus some laptops are used for work, and some hobbies _are_ the exact same that other people call work. Some are used essentially as a portable desktop, rather than something to keep you amused on a plane or to haul your powerpoint presentations with.
E.g., you can have an application server, an Oracle database, and an IDE on your laptop, and notice the difference, for example. Waiting for, say, WebSphere to spend a quarter of an hour to start up with a lot of EJB's, trust me, you'll start thinking "man, I wish I had a faster machine." Especially when you've had to restart it just because you changed a tiny little detail in the configs and it can't use it without a restart. Twiddling your thumbs while Ant builds the project or while WebSphere deploys it, even more so. And the database alone can need arbitrary amounts of RAM and HDD just to do its job.
And then there are the cases where you need to debug it. Only recently, in version 6.1 IBM finally allegedly managed to be able to debug with the JIT enabled. Previously it would run in interpreted mode. Now that's enough to negate the last decade of Moore's Law in one fell swoop.
Other people use their computer for rendering, CAD, maths, simulations, etc. There are many ways to eat all those CPU cycles and then some.
And then there are the games. Some people use their laptop as, basically, an ultra-portable desktop that can be hauled to a LAN party with a minimum of fuss and effort.
Basically if your use for a computer is just to read emails, well, good for you. But you can stop extrapolating that everyone else doesn't need a fast one.