Asus Eee PC sails into Australia in December

Stan Beer
Thursday, 01 November 2007 14:39

Opinion and Analysis

The new Asus Linux sub-notebook, the Eee PC, hits Australian shores in December, sporting a 7 inch screen and 4G flash RAM drive. The Eee PC, lightweight in both power and mass, is aimed squarely at the lifestyle entry level market and is not suitable for anyone wanting to do serious work. However, at $499 is Asus asking too much for too little?
With an underpowered 900 MHz Celeron processor,Ethernet port, built-in 802.11b/g wireless LAN, 3 USB 2.0 ports andMMC/SD/MS card reader, together with a pre-installed version of theXandros Linux distribution, the Eee PC has enough grunt and conectivityfor an average Web surfer. It also has the usual bundled open sourceoffice productivity tools, as well as some of the lifestyle featuresthat users would expect, such as media player, photo manager, built-invideo camera, and a few low-level games.

This is all very nice but isn't the main point of having one thesethings for lifestyle purposes. So what if you want to watch movies on aplane? No DVD player and only 4GB of storage.

With only a 7 inch screen, you probably wouldn't be using one of theselittle darlings at home to surf the net or for doing your homeworkwould you?. It's not even for taking away on holidays because a realnotebook can be used for that. No this baby notebook is for taking withyou on the run - at least that's what Asus is telling us.

“Applications on PCs today are mostly online, whether it is checkingemails and communicating via other methods such as instant messaging orvoice over IP, utilising online share spaces, or simply reading news.Being online has now become a big part of daily computing operationsfor work and fun, for young and old," says Ted Chen, Managing Directorof ASUS Australia.

But can't we already do those things and more on the run using an AppleiPhone and a growing range of similar devices? Oh, but the Eee PC alsogives users the option to run Windows Vista.

Running Windows Vista on a lightweight PC with 512MB of RAM, a 900MHzCeleron processor and 4GB of storage. Now that I would like to see - ormaybe not!