Asus multi-touch mouse gives you room to zoom

by Alex Zaharov-Reutt

Thursday, 15 May 2008

Page 1 of 3 ! I’ve just been having a play with the new Asus Eee PC 900 series, loaded up with Linux and 20 glorious gigabytes of space, that much nicer screen, a rather nifty multi-touch trackpad and that same ol’ keyboard. But this time, I liked it much more! When I first laid hands, fingers and eyes on the original Asus Eee 701 series subnotebook PC, I really did like it a lot. That was despite the 4GB of storage space, of which there was actually less once you’d taken into consideration the Xandros Linux operating system and other installed software such as Open Office, Firefox, Skype and the rest. It was also despite a 7-inch screen and the small keyboard, which I initially found a bit fiddly to type on. But I’ve just been playing with the new Asus Eee PC 900 – the bigger brother, with 1GB of memory instead of the original 512Mb, 20GB of space instead of 4GB, a much nicer 8.9-inch screen, a very cool multi-touch capable mousing trackpad, but the same keyboard. Since then, other sub-notebook contenders have come into play, as I investigated in my previous Asus story which also looked at HP’s Mini-Note PC. But the Asus Eee PC 900 will be on sale by the end of the month, and it will still be the cheapest ‘sub-notebook’ on the market. I don’t know, maybe the bigger screen on the Eee 900 really makes a difference, but I felt much more comfortable typing on the keyboard this time around, and seemed to make many fewer mistakes in my not-quite-true touch typing but still very fast typing indeed. And lest you think that’s because I bought an Asus Eee 701 and am used to the keyboard from that, the answer is no – I didn’t buy one, so I’m definitely not used to the smaller keys, but I did feel a lot more comfortable with it. They keys, at least, are much better than those found on the much more expensive HTC Shift, whose keys are only good for hunt and peck typing – at least the Eee 900 let me ‘touch type’. While I long to try an Asus Eee PC-sized competitor with a bigger keyboard, if I had to make a decision right NOW, I’d be pretty happy with the Asus Eee 900. Sure, I’d want to get rid of the simple GUI that Xandros offers as standard and install a normal desktop instead, or maybe even try Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 on it, instead. Or maybe – shock horror – just go for the Windows XP version where everything is as I’d expect it to be. But if I was to buy one, it’d be about using it to type. Now, it’s it’s easy to plug in an external keyboard, even if it is one of those regular notebook sized keyboards, but that does mean an extra thing to carry around, partially defeating the purpose of getting such a small notebook in the first place. And having a separate keyboard plugged in means the screen will be that much further away from your eyes, which might, at least for some, detract from the fact that Asus have made the 900’s screen just under two inches bigger. So, what about the cool new multi-touch capability? Please read onto page 2. << First page <   1 2 3 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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