ASUS Eee PC
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Hardware, Review
This amazing little laptop houses:
- Solid-State disk of 4GB
- 512MB DDR2 of memory
- 7″ WVGA (800X480)
- Built-in webcamera
- Linux OS (Windows XP drivers included)
All bundled together for only $400 from ASUS.
Now that may seem like a pitiful display of specs in comparison to the laptops of today, but what you don’t realize is that having a 7″ screen with no internal moving parts can be a huge benefit and give a whole new look to the term “portable computing”.
I would think it to be a fair assumption that anyone serious about portable computing, is serious about computing in general. The example being, the laptop would only be used in conjunction with an existing home desktop. Thereby allowing the user to work on projects away from home and quickly and easily transfer the new data onto the main computer at home.
Now you may bring up the point that the Eee PC does not have an optical drive, and the lack of a significant amount of space would make a conventional laptop a better choice for portable computing. While this is true to some extent, what you do have to factor in is the cons of having those components.
An optical drive is a heat producing, noisy piece of equipment, and including it with a laptop increases overall size and cooling requirements. And as it is not the Eee PC’s main purpose is to be used as a media center, or gaming machine, having an optical drive is unnecessary. Any data transfer that needs doing can by preformed via one of the three USB ports, or via the web.
Now a hard drive is well known for being a huge bottleneck in a modern PC. The process of obtaining and working with data is slowed considerably the moment the computer has to wait for data to be written to the drive. And in addition hard drives are a common source of failure and data loss. Their physical structure also results in a device much larger than their solid-state alternatives, not to mention because of their internal movements, they also generate a tremendous amount of heat.
So therefore going with a solid-state drive, even at the sacrifice of disk capacity, seems worth it. Specially with the cost of flash drives becoming increasingly cheaper.
The last thing I wanted to touch on regards the software installed on the laptop. Because of the space constraints, I foresee users relying on online productivity tools and storage (Google Docs/Zoho), which will hopefully bring an improvement to these services. Specially in syncing between multiple computers.
In closing I would like to add that because this laptop has the backing of the Linux open source community we can be sure to see lots of new and interesting software ideas to come up to take advantage of the light weight portability, and in time maybe see some an improvement to the “Web Desktop“
