Asus Eee PC 900 is a ripper not a rip-off: review

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 14 May 2008 12:47

Opinion and Analysis

If you're the type that needs everything to be on the desktop and the 20GB of flash storage is not enough, there are three USB ports that you can use for an external hard disk drive, flash memory stick or external optical disk drive.

Of course, the Eee PC 900 is not supposed to be just a work machine.

Although they don't interest me, Asus has made quite a reasonable attempt to package some science, maths and language educational packages that would probably appeal to school students up to junior high level. As one Linux advocate I spoke to recently said, the Eee PC is something that high school students would probably go nuts over because it's so easy to just chuck in your bag and use anywhere.

As far as the "play" features of the Eee PC 900 are concerned, the games are pretty basic stuff. However, the lifestyle features are good, with the popular Amarok music organiser pre-installed as well as inbuilt 1.3 megapixel webcam, sound recorder, media player, photo and video organisers and so on. Of course, being Linux, there's no iTunes but, if you're not hung up on using the iTunes store, Amarok devotees will swear it doesn't matter.

In my last story about the Eee PC 900, I gave Asustek Australia a bit of curry for setting the price of the Linux version at $649 compared to $599 for the Windows version, when overseas both machines carry identical price tags. However, it should be noted in Asus' favour that for once Australians are paying similar prices in their local currency as their counterparts in the US. It's nice to know that we're not being price gouged for technology as is the case with other vendors.

The real question of course is whether the Asus Eee PC 900 Linux model is worth the money. Before answering, I want to once again differentiate between the Linux and Windows versions.

I like the form factor of the Eee PC 900 and the more I've used it writing this, the more comfortable I've felt with it. However, I don't think it was designed for Windows – it's not powerful enough to deal with the added overheads, especially security.

On the other hand, looking at the Eee PC 900 with this particular packaged version of Xandros Linux, the question springs to mind what other sub-notebook is available at this price that is comparable. The answer is none. So is it worth $649? Hell, yes!