ASUS Eee PC Review

So I bought an ASUS Eee PC 4G Surf which is a lot of words for a very small computer. I’ve only had it a few days, so keep that in mind when reading this review. The keyboard is kind of small so I keep making the same typos and occasionally launching confusing Linux functions, plus there’s the occasional static discharge, but overall I’m thrilled to have a computer despite the lack of CD/DVD drive. It’s a damn site more functional than a smartphone, and as far as the first few real hours of use have gone, I’ve been impressed.

It uses Amarok for playing .mp3 and .wma files, and OpenOffice is pre-installed as well for creating and managing basic documents.

It reads jump drives and SD cards that I’ve filled with files from the windows desktop just fine, and I suspect that it would interface with an ipod as if it were another hard drive for storage. I’ll almost certainly rely on this for traveling and surfing, but not for much else beyond email, calender, and writing. And the battery life seems to be about 1 1/2 hours if you’ve got a jump drive you’re attaching, but it doesn’t seem to diminish the battery life much to use SD cards. Using the Wifi really eats up the battery life, so I’m assuming if I wasn’t using the internet my battery life would hover around the advertised 3 hours or so. You’ll note I’ve already begun modding the cover.

It doesn’t load cds or dvds, but I’ve got no problem watching avi’s I’ve mysteriously uncovered on my hard drive. So while I can’t watch a full film on battery, I can certainly watch the latest episode of Lost. The storage issue is pretty easy to work around with SD cards, I’ve got a 4gig and I’m getting an 8gig later this year. Plus I do a lot on server side, relying on software like Buzzword — so I can easily work around that way. External devices that power themselves are preferable because I noticed a dramatic power drain when I plugged in a little usb memory stick. Here’s a video of me showing the Eee connect to an external hard drive and booting up an .avi file.

While
I believe the operating system is compatible with more downloadable Linux programs I haven’t attempted to install anything. Instead I’ve been tacking on plug-ins to Firefox, FireFTP being one of the most useful I’ve found so far. Honestly, it’s a small hard drive at 4 gigs, and this device is meant primarily for surfing the net, but there are a lot of server side applications out there now – computers don’t necessarily need to have massive storage capacity if they can get online.

However, you can get a windows one and here’s a youtube video of an ASUS from start-up to shut-down with what looks like Windows XP with service pack 2 booting up and opening in office 2003.

Personally, I got this to try out Linux, get my feet wet, and I’m liking it — it’s somewhere between a mac and a pc, and very very cool for email and text applications.

I am not sure what Linux version it is, but it’s only crashed once and that was due to me forgetting how long stuff takes on 512mb of ram and trying to do too much. 512 MB memory is pretty small, here’s a video of an upgrade operation to an Eee to bring that up to a gig:

The Eee PC fits in my pocket and provides me more than an hour of internet access, which feels like a good deal at the 300-350$ price range. Having this as an introduction to Linux is another major plus, and being able to use the SD card in my digital video camera is a massive bonus, especially with fireftp tacked onto my Firefox so I can upload direct to my server. Plus both the video review files that I uploaded to Google video were uploaded direct from the SD card through the notebook to Google video, with no editing. This is a serious tool for an amateur blogger with little or no money, and is probably aimed at a student demographic - it feels very much like the XO-1, however it isn’t nearly as cute. Ultimately though, I’m very, very happy with my purchase, and I’ll be relying on this over the coming months as I work on the next round of projects.

I love this fucking thing. Just check out the voice recognition action:

Buy On Amazon:

ASUS Eee PC 2G
ASUS Eee PC 4G Surf