I bought an Asus Eee PC this week because I just loved the idea behind it. It’s a 2lb ultraportable PC, and it’s probably going to become my main portable machine. There’s just no need to carry a 15″ laptop around with me everywhere I go just in case I need to take some notes or put something on my calendar.
In many ways, it reminds me of the Atari Portfolio. You’ve probably seen a Portfolio, although you probably didn’t know what it was at the time. It was the portable computer young John Connor used to hack the ATM and later Cyberdyne’s vault in Terminator 2. The Portfolio came out in 1989, around the time 80386-based DOS machines were starting to take over the desktop. Sure, there were laptops. But the only ultraportables of the day were overgrown calculators with calendars and address books running custom operating systems.
Atari’s machine actually featured a 80C88 processor and a customized variant of MS-DOS 2.11, and could run DOS programs that could fit in its 128k of RAM and didn’t try to bypass the BIOS and operating system to access hardware. It came with useful software, including a spreadsheet that could read Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets. Oh, and it had a QWERTY keyboard with tiny keys.
The Eee PC is the modern incarnation of this sort of PC. It’s a tiny laptop, measuring only 8.86″ x 6.46″, with a 7″ diagonal screen. It has a QWERTY keyboard with tiny keys, just like the Portfolio. The hardware is a little more modern though: a 900MHz Celeron M underclocked to about 600MHz and 512MB RAM (expandable to 2GB). It has 802.11b/g wifi and a 100baseT ethernet port. There’s a VGA connector in case you want to use it with a real monitor or hook it up to a projector to make that big presentation for the board of directors.
The Portfolio didn’t come with a hard or floppy drive, but instead used battery-backed RAM “portfolio cards” and a RAM disk set up in its built-in memory. The Eee PC uses built-in flash memory (4gb in my model) and an SD/MMC card slot. It also has three USB ports which can be used for USB flash drives, among other things (I do still have that USB “back massager” Katie gave me a few years ago).
So what’s the Eee PC good for? Anything, really, as long as it can be done comfortably on a 7″ 800×480 screen. It comes with open source productivity programs, web programs (Firefox, Skype…), various media players, and games. Everything is accessed through a simple menu system or through voice commands. Plus, it’s running Linux, and I can hit ctrl-alt-t to get a shell window where I can access the operating system and do fun things like SSH into the servers at work.
If that’s not enough, it comes with drivers for Windows XP, and people have installed other operating systems on it including Ubuntu Linux and AmigaOS. It is, after all, a 600MHz PC.
The model I got comes with a 2.8hr battery. But, really, if I’m going to be using a computer for hours on end, that’s when I’d grab my Dell on the way out the door.
I’ve only messed around with the Eee PC for about an hour so far, but I’m loving it. It’s really portable but still powerful enough for a web geek like me.
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