Eee PC review

So, as I mentioned earlier, I have already got my Asus Eee PC. It is white 701 model with 900MHz Intel Celeron-M ULV 353, 512 MB DDR2-667 RAM, 4 GB SSD drive, Linux, integrated camera and microphone, 3x USB, MMC/SD/MS card reader, 802.11b/g wireless LAN, 10/100 Mbit Ethernet and 5200 mAH battery. It has 7'' TFT LCD with LED backlight.

Of course, the most of you probably know specifications of this device, so I will not going to discuss them. I used it for three days quite extensively. In short: It is great product. I was surprised how flawlessly this computer worked. Customized Linux shines and it is very simple to use. I tried to attach USB mouse, external hard drive, USB flash drive, SD card from my camera and they were recognized immediately. A keyboard is surprisingly comfortable (which denies my earlier post about "not very great keyboard"). Touchpad works ok. Sound from speakers is quite good too. Standard software allows you to do any common operations with your computer. You can browse with Mozilla Firefox, chat in various IM protocols with Pidgin and call with Skype. There is various shortcuts to various Google products (iGoogle, Google docs and others), wikipedia. Office suite experience is provided by OpenOffice.org. There is also Adobe PDF reader. You can watch films, play music and manage photos with specialized programs. Some linux (including KDE) games are included too (frozen bubble and tux racer one of them). I didn't mention all installed programs, there is also some other utilities and educational software.

Overall experience is very pleasant. Everything feels like made professionally without annoying bugs. Eee PC really boots and shut downs very fast. I recommend with computer for all, who wants small and light device for ordinary tasks and don't want to pay a lot of money for it.

It has minuses too. Firstly, it is a short battery life. What is more, after it completely discharged it takes quite a long time to charge again, especially, if you work with the computer (when it charges "forever"). Other minus is wireless configuration. Computer doesn't remember wireless configuration (for example, WEP key) after shut down and you always need to configure wireless connection once again. This is very annoying. Update (2007-11-14 8:31): I didn't notice an icon in a taskbar where you could reconnect wireless connection without reconfiguring it (My sister found it somehow :D). If you make a mistake in wireless configuration, connection goes to pending mode and you can't reconfigure it without rebooting or killing some processes (you can also try to connect to another wireless connection to solve this). If you want to do with linux something more you can have more problems too. Lastly, almost any update requires reboot (what is quite strange). Someone can call a minus that the computer becomes quite hot after long usage in the bottom.

So, this is all for now. I will add some photos later.

You can look at the linux interface demo here: http://honeypothack.com/eee/.