The Gizmo Report: an Eee PC in the house

I recently mentioned my plan to get the new Eee PC laptop from Asus in spite of a price hike just before the product was introduced. The Eee PC is basically a low-cost subnotebook intended for developing markets, like the One Laptop Per Child project's XO, which I've also written about here--but unlike the OLPC, the Eee PC will be regularly available in commercial channels.

Well, earlier this week, I found the gizmo for sale over on Newegg.com and placed my order. A mere $458.45 later, including California sales tax and two-day shipping, it was on the way, and it arrived Friday. Here are some initial impressions; I'll post again soon after I've had some time to play with it.

The model offered by Newegg for $399.99 is the high-end configuration in the Eee PC family, at least for the moment. It comes with a 4GB solid-state (flash) disk drive, 512MB of RAM, a 38 watt-hour battery, and a built-in webcam. Cheaper models offer smaller batteries, no webcam, and smaller amounts of flash and RAM for $299 or $349-- but not at NewEgg; they only have the most expensive model. (Also unavailable is a model with an 8GB disk.)

All models share a 900 MHz Intel Celeron M processor (reportedly the ULV model 353) and a 7", 800x480-pixel LCD driven by an Intel integrated-graphics chipset. The Celeron processor isn't very fast, and it consumes more power than I expected-- much more than you really want to see in a tiny machine like this; the bottom of the Eee PC gets quite hot while playing Web videos.

But I found out tonight that the Eee PC could play this one car video that gave my Mac fits every time I tried it. I won't link to the video here because it, or the page it's on, crashed both Safari and Firefox under Mac OS X as well as Internet Explorer and Firefox under Windows Vista running in a Parallels Desktop virtual machine. This was the first time I've ever seen that happen.

But I had the Eee PC within arm's reach, so I hooked it up to my home network, typed in the URL off my Mac's screen, and the video came right up. It was a little choppy, but watchable. Score one for Asus, I guess.

Anyway, please stay tuned for a more detailed review soon. CNET has published a formal review (here), so I'll be focusing on the more esoteric elements of the product.

[mhinnewyork]

Get a feel for an 800x480 display

To get a feel for how web pages look on an 800 by 480 screen, go to any web page and type this into the address bar

javascript:resizeTo(800,480);

When I do this on my monitor, the resulting window is 12 inches diagonally. Viewing this on a 7 inch screen, text would be very hard to read. Your mileage will vary - my screen is 19 inches square at 1152x864.
Michael Horowitz

[Peter N. Glaskowsky]

Wow, excellent

I have a couple of Javascript bookmarks like this:

javascript:nbr=prompt('Enter%20the%20name%20of%20the%20Wikipedia%20entry:','Text');window.location.href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'%20+%20nbr;

but I've never looked into the other things that can be done this way. That resizing idea is an excellent tip for usability testing.

Various Eee PC reviews have dinged the machine for the size of the display, and I'll be talking about the practical consequences of that limitation in my more detailed review.

Thanks for the note.

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[kkrewell]

Check the actual clock speed

I read one report that the Eee PC clocks the processor bus at only 70MHz, lowering the actual processor clock speed to 630MHz (even though it's a 900MHz Celeron processor).

Central Computer had a shipment at the Nov. 1 launch but quickly sold out. They still had a demo unit in the store, so I did try it out for a bout 5 minutes. OpenOffice seemed to work fine and task switching was fast enough.

[Peter N. Glaskowsky]

Seems to be 900

There's a utility to show the CPU clock speed, and it reports 900. I suppose it could be misled by bad clocking, but I doubt that's going on.

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[kkrewell]

Eee PC is also in MY house now!

I bought an Eee PC. I couldn't resist giving it a try and the price point wasn't unacceptable. So far, I think it's pretty good. ASUS seems to have built a pretty solid machine. With the solid state drive, I won't feel bad about bouncing it around. The WiFi works well. I still have a lot more to try.

[kkrewell]

A most excellent review of the Eee PC...

including Lunix hacks can be found on Ars Technica:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/eee-pc-review.ars/1