The EEE PC
I’ve had the EEE PC for a few weeks now, and I’m writing this in the pub (no wifi signal so I can’t browse the net).
It’s an exceptional little machine. It’s tiny, dinky even - which is both it’s greatest strength and weakness. The keyboard is very small, but more on that later. It’s so light that I hardly notice it in my bag, whereas my old Toshiba was like carrying round a couple of bricks.
Although the screen is small (800 x 480), it’s fine for most purposes (I’d bought it purely as a thin client/dumb terminal to connect to the internet. Of course this pub has no wifi). By most purposes, I mean using the internet, and that means Firefox. By running Firefox in full screen it’s perfectly usable.
If I wanted a serious laptop, I’d have bought a serious laptop, however I made the conscious decision to buy the EEE PC because it wasn’t an expensive, powerful computer. Although I’m a computer artist, if I wanted to do any art I’d not want to work on ANY laptop, especially since I have a 24 inch monitor on my powerful iMac. Over the last year I’ve moved most of my computing software to Google - email, RSS reading, document editing, calendar et al., so all a I wanted was Firefox, a screen and a keyboard.
Since there is no wifi here, I’ve switched off the Wifi mode (Function key+F2), which seems to make a huge difference to the battery life - indeed the battery life is my second biggest issue after the keyboard size. I get about 2.5 hours withWiFi enabled, and just over 3 hours with it disabled.
The keyboard is what takes the most getting used to. It’s not ultra tiny, and it’s certainly much more usable than the soft keyboard on my iPod touch. It’s comparable in size to the iGo Stowaway Bluetooth keyboard, and to be perfectly honest, after 2 to 3 minutes of typing each time I use it my hands adjust. It’s similar to the switch I had to make when I switched to playing guitar after playing bass for a few hours. The biggest bugbear is actually the arrow keys, which are placed so close to the right shift that I continually hit the up arrow when I try to use shift. Again, after a few minutes this becomes less of an issue.
I’m writing this is Google Docs - but as I mentioned I have no Wi-Fi here. Thankfully Google have brought their Google Gears technology to Docs, which means I can create new documents and edit existing ones offline. When I get home (or find any network signal), the documents will sync again. Google Reader also works fantastically well with no network thanks to Gears. I’d been away for a few days, so I’d built up 600-700 unread feed items. Google Gears downloaded all these and I was then able to read them offline.
If only Google mail had an offline mode…
