Eee PC - eerily popular

Charles Wright
Tuesday, 04 December 2007 08:04

Opinion and Analysis

It's easy to upgrade the memory with 2GB of DDR-2 667 RAM. Asus denies widespread rumours that tinkering with the RAM voids the warranty.

A potentially more serious limitation could be a missing mini-PCIe (PCI Express Mini Card) expansion connector, which could bar some users from an anticipated 32GB SSD upgrade. Some users say There are two versions of the 701 4G: an A version and a B version, one of which could have only one, rather than two of the connectors. Myer computer sales staff we talked to didn't have a clue about that. Asustek's PR firm were also none the wiser, and with the Asus product managers in Taiwan for a sales conference, illumination may be some time arriving.

And the world at large is still yet to learn whether the Eee PC is a mere blip on the radar screen, or a strategic inflection point that could change the way we do things.

There is no doubt that it is particularly attractive to the education community. One Melbourne teacher who has been evaluating one of the units commented on one blog that he was "mightily impressed".

"We can get two of these for each 'normal'laptop, and for a school, that's important - as is storage. I can put a class set of these in a milk crate rather than the ridiculous trolleys needed to lug around the current laptops. The Eee PC will do 50% of what kids need, so instead of buying say 12 laptops, I would buy six laptops and 12 Eee PC's." And, he reported,"The kids who have taken it for a test drive love it!"

My opinion is that it will have much wider appeal than that. I see it as a important pointer to the emerging ShrinkAge culture.

The Eee PC will be a great tool for the mobile workforce, for those of us who want to read e-books on a better screen, who want to keep journals (it's not much bigger than a Filofax), process the email Inbox, and indeed all those other computer tasks that we might have been doing with notebook PCs - even ultra-portable ones - were they not just that touch too awkward to access. Maybe they should be calling it the PPP PC. It's Personal. Practical. Petite. And possibly even Pretty.