Asus eee 701

Asia already had this little gadget in stores for months now. For the US and UK it is old news too. But for continental Europe, the Asus eee series is still something new. I had put myself on a pre-order list way back in November 2007, but got tired with listening to the "next month, really!" excuses from the import company. Thus, I canceled that order, and waited for them to arrive in the stores, which happened in the first two weeks of May. Now, finally, via my company, I have the chance to play around with one.

It's cute!



I put the DVD case on the keyboard as a comparison in size. You see, it is rather tiny, a class below normal-sized laptops. I believe the official term would be: an ultra-mobile PC, or UMPC. The Asus 701 weighs about 1kg, so it is ideal to just toss in my back-pack and take it along to... well... anywhere, I suppose. I say toss, because it is a fairly robust piece of technology. It has no hard drive, but a SSD (solid state drive). Think of the kind of memory you get on an USB-stick, but faster. Plus points: no delicate moving parts (as in an ordinary hard drive), and rather quick. Negatives: not much storage, only 4Gb (and that's not counting the OS).

It comes installed with a modified Xandros distribution (that's Linux and no Windows). For those familiar with the Linux world: the window manager is an old KDE, a far cry from the spiffy Gnome I've come to know from my Ubuntu desktop at work, but still very functional. On top of Xandros, Asus got it pre-packaged with a number of well known apps: Skype (which works fine with the built in 0.3M webcam), Pidgin, Firefox and Thunderbird to name but a few.

The tiny screen (7"), the low resolution (800 by 480) and the small keyboard do take some getting used to, but after some tweaking with font-sizes and tool bars the screen is reasonably usable and, well, after some adapting, the keyboard turns out to be manageable. Given the price, about 300 EUR, I can certainly live with those limitations. For the functionality you get out of it, it's a bargain.

So, in short, yes, I love it.