Catshanghai

The new Asus Eeepc would be a very unremarkable miniature subnotebook, except it is so cheaply priced and is getting all sorts of hype at the moment as you can see from Will Harris’s video review on Channelflip. It has gone on sale in the UK for 220 GBP and I have heard that you can buy it in Shanghai for 3000 to 3500 RMB.

The specs are pretty basic. It has a 900 mhz processor, 512mb of Ram and 4gb of flash memory to store files. The keyboard is smaller than a standard laptop’s and the screen is only 7 inches. There is even a built in webcam and wi-fi. The Eeepc comes with a modified version of Linux, which means the desktop is basically a set of icons that link to webapps and its applications that include Skype, OpenOffice and Firefox. The Eeepc is also capable of running Windows XP. Battery life is supposed to be four hours using wi-fi, although Patrick Norton of Tekzilla reckons it is closer to two hours.

The small form factor and modest price point would make the Eeepc an ideal student machine suitable for web research, note taking and communication. It is not an all powerful multimedia computer capable of running the latest video editing software or 3D simulations so it may be limited in its scope. Still, I like the keyboard and the screen and could envisage using it as a mobile research and blogging tool when I am on the road. At the moment, I use my HTC Hermes 200 Smartphone for this purpose, but it is not quite capable enough for me to efficiently and comfortably enter text and view more than PDA versions of websites. I may be tempted to invest in an Eeepc as my on the road Internet device.