I am attempting to reduce the amount of junk I am taking with me when I go, and also dump anything of value that might increase my security risk any higher than it will already be for a white female travelling solo in developing nations and poverty stricken areas. My laptop was the first problem on my list… I want to take a machine with me so I can get a bit of work done on the road – I may be away from internet cafes for periods at a time, or might even take a short lease and want to tinker from there. But my 17″ Macbook Pro was a problem – the size, the weight, the value (about AU$4400 when I bought it a year ago) and the shiny “look at me” (read:”steal from me”) factor.
After doing some research, I bought me a most awesome little black EeePC to take with me when I go. At AU$460 from JB Hifi, it’s about 8″ across and is currently running its native Xandros, and eeeXubuntu from a USB stick, and will shortly have an nLitened version of WinXP available to it on a 16 GB high speed SD card. My only need for Windows is to have a .NET development platform, but as much as possible I’ll be using probably Ubuntu and tinkering either with Ruby on Rails development or Mono.
I was anticipating great things from Apple at the MacWorld Expo earlier this year, especially in the ultraportable / subnotebook area. I am disappointed with the result. While technologically the Macbook Air is cool, it achieves very little for most people – its not that much thinner than other laptops, but admittedly is probably lighter for business users to carry. I don’t think it is revolutionary. For me, the thinness wouldn’t make me want to buy it either for travel or for work – and I tote my MacBook pro to work every day!
I see forum posts everywhere wistfully referring to the 12″ powerbooks and wondering where they went, when Apple will once again provide a smaller, more portable model of laptop. If one had been released I would have bought it, even though it may have set me back a few thousand. But instead I surveyed the current market – a few obscure models from Fujitsu; the incredibly expensive and ugly Toshiba portable series; one or two others; or the Asus EEE PC for under AU$500.
Although I was disappointed with only having the 4GB available in Australia (I was hoping to get the 8GB at least), it was still too good an opportunity to pass up. I am looking forward to the next set of models from Asus, as well as the competition which is already creeping out in this market – the Cloudbook was released recently and others are rumoured to be on their way.
Hardware
My model has a CPU of 900MHz, 2GB of RAM (upgraded by me, 2GB of SO-DIMM cost me about $70 from the local computer fair) and 4GB of disk space on a solid state hard drive. The machine has an SD card slot which I filled with a 16GB A-Data Class 6 SD Card (via eBay, about AU$100 last check).
The screen display is small, but clear. The first thing I noticed was how many web sites are fixed width and require horizontal scrolling. There are even some sites which try to be helpful but fail miserably – I went to one flight-planning website where the flash flight planner resized itself to fit in the browser window. Very nice – but impossible to use on such a small screen as it also downsized the text and toolbars to make them unreadable. I’d probably prefer to use the VGA-out and work from a larger screen if I were doing solid work for a time, but for most things it is fine.
I don’t like the mouse button at all – it feels cheap and tacky. Its a single physical piece, but actually represents two mouse buttons – clicking on the left end is a left click, and clicking on the right end is a right click. There is no discernible line to divide the two, and the click itself is… cludgy? I’m not sure how to explain it. It requires a fair bit of pressure in the right place to carry out the click, and feels like it will be the first thing to go.
I’m also not a huge fan of the touch pad, but I’ve yet to play too much with the sensitivity settings so perhaps I can get it to feel more natural. Amos tells me that I may have been spoilt by my Mac touchpad, hehehe.
With a mouse attached, the only thing left to play with is the keyboard. Now this is really weird – it feels tiny when you start using it. I had a lot of trouble typing solid chunks of text when I first started. But after using it for an hour, I was fine. You may not appreciate how cool that is unless you see how chubby my fingers are and how clumsy I am 
. Returning to a full sized machine and a full sized keyboard is a really shocking experience. You may feel like a tiny Alice in a giant wonderland, gaping in astonishment at such a large screen. You’ll probably even have trouble typing on that normal sized keyboard for a little while until your fingers adjust.
It is very light, feels solid and sturdy and if you have decent sized cargo pants it will probably fit in a pocket.
You can find full tech specs at the Asus EeePC site.
The EeePC comes with the Xandros operating system by default. This is a variant of Linux, and the out-of-the-box setup has the OS running in basic mode. Big icons, applications named by function rather than by product name (e.g. the music player is called music player). I was surprised to see that upon initial inspection the graphic skin of the OS is very similar to Windows. Enough so that even after my father played with one on store display for a while, he took it to be running Windows. This may go a long way to helping encourage those users that are traditionally ma and pa Windows users over to Linux, without even really knowing that they have been coaxed away. And it is such a simple system that they can’t really go wrong (although more on that below).
Since having the system I have installed a small module that allows me to get to advanced mode for Xandros – I actually have a desktop and menu access to all the tools one would require, and then of course synaptics to install other fun things. There are a few weird things – if you do a full update in synaptics (or apt) you may find Firefox will crash on you until you apply a specific fix (d’oh); until you do a bios update you may also find that the system runs at about 630MHz instead of its 900MHz claimed.
Xandros in its provided form also doesn’t recognise any more than 1GB of RAM, which is a little disappointing. Not being confident with compiling kernels, I am likely to just switch OSs to get something that will recognise it and will require less effort and frustration on my part.
It appears that EeePCs will soon be available with Windows pre-installed, if they aren’t already.
Capabilities
I’ve yet to push it fully, but it looks impressive. There are plenty of people using EeePCs to run World of Warcraft (come on now, even if you don’t like WoW you have to admit that its cool that this little thing can run it), using Visual Studio, running OS X, you name it.
For Travel
There are already a bunch of people producing travel power adapter kits for the EeePC, depending on your operating system and device of choice you can use 3G or other networks for almost global wireless internet connectivity. Asus announced that a future version of the EeePC will come with Wimax built in.
Conclusion
For general travellers I’m sure it will be a hit, and I think it will suit the needs of many a roaming developer as well. Graphic designers or media artists will be out of luck – the hardware is not yet up to the task of heavy multimedia work (audio, video or heavy graphics processing) but there are all sorts of rumours out there about new small and powerful chips being produced by Intel for MSI. It will be interesting to see what hardware advancements and competition will bring to the market in 2008.