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Fuzzy Logic Should you buy an Asus Eee 901 PC?
Fuzzy Logic Should you buy an Asus Eee 901 PC? | Should you buy an Asus Eee 901 PC? |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Monday, 23 June 2008 | |
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That leads to a difficult question for consumers and manufacturers alike: is now the right time to buy, or will a wait of a few months deliver more choice and more power for the same money? The situation is complicated by the new Eee PC 901. It builds on the 701 and 900 series by adding a much more power efficient processor in the Intel Atom, although the Atom’s performance isn’t what you’d class as explosive, effectively not being much more powerful than the Celeron 900Mhz processor it is replacing. But the Atom’s performance isn’t the issue – what it delivers is roughly a doubling of battery power at worst, and a tripling at best, and giving mobile users what they need most: battery power. Of course that’s only if the work you’re doing is everyday tasks like wordprocessing, spreadsheets, email and web browsing. Video editing was never designed to be done on one of these cheap subnotebooks. But for those “everyday” tasks, the Atom’s processor is more than good enough, and now that Intel is manufacturing it in volume, we can expect to see it in cheap laptops all over the place, while Intel works to make Atom’s successors just as power efficient while dramatically improving performance. Other features such as the 8.9-inch screen with 1024x600 resolution are much better than the previous 800x480 effort, eliminating the need to scroll sideways on web pages, the boost in storage from 4GB to 20GB total (on the Linux version, 12GB of the Windows version) means more space for your data. The biggest complaint, at least for some, will be the keyboard. If you’ve got fat fingers, the 901’s keyboard can simply be too small for touch typing, and while touch typing can certainly be done, and gotten used to, a bigger keyboard negates the need for such re-training. That said, if you’re a two-finger typist, it’s probably less of an issue, although a small keyboard will always be a small keyboard, making it easier to hit the wrong key. So, should you buy now, or wait, and what are the alternatives? Please continue to page 2. |
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