ASUS EeePC Review
First published in Linux Journal issue #167
The Asus eee PC is an extremely small ultraportable notebook at the cheapest end of the market. At $399 USD, it’s supremely affordable. The entire industry has been buzzing around it, with Asus claiming that it’s America’s most popular Christmas gift.
When we arrived at the store to pick up our Eee to review, all the salespeople were busy. We had a look among the laptops for it and couldn’t see it - had the shipment been delayed?
We finally snared a salesperson to ask about the Eee, and were led to the small elecronics cabinet. There nestled among the compact cameras and iPods was one of the smallest laptops we’d ever seen. The box it was handed to us in is also diminutive. Inside the box is the Eee, manuals, CD, charger, neoprene sleeve and the Eee’s battery. We appreciated the inclusion of the sleeve - most notebook bag and case makers have nothing for a machine this small.
First Impressions
Asthetically, the Eee looks exactly what it is - a miniture laptop. Ours came in pearl white. It drew comments and admiring glances everywhere we took it, for both it’s extremely small size and it’s smooth styling. The only aspect that marrs it’s appearance is a large screen bezel. We feel the Eee would be vastly improved cosmetically if the screen filled even half of that bezel. It’s a minor issue in an otherwise extremely attractive notebook.
The Eee has a nice touchpad, if a little small. There is a single width button that will execute a right click if you press down on the right hand side. We found this a little difficult to get used to as it was hard to tell without looking exactly where you were about to click. The touchpad will scroll if one traces a finger down the far right, an extremely small target we found hard to reliably hit. We’ve read a lot of reviews that seem displeased with the keyboard, and frankly we just can’t see why. The keyboard has an excellent feel to it, although again it is extremely small. We found it took less than an hour to get used to touch-typing on it at quite a reasonable speed.
The screen is LED backlit, making it extremely bright. Unfortunately that’s the only kind thing we can say about it. The contrast and colour is dreadful, and while the screen is a reasonable DPI the resolution is just not high enough for web browsing. Most sites these days are optimised for at least a 1024×768 resolution and only having 800 pixels wide caused us to need to scroll sideways fairly often to see whole pages.
Caption: Web browsing shows how cramped the eee screen is
The speakers are surprisingly good. Sure, the sound isn’t studio quality but the volume can be maxed out without distortion and the clarity is acceptable. Volume is excellent. With good headphones sound is even better although it did have a slightly muddy quality. The headphone socket is extremely clean with no discernable hiss even at high volumes. The internal microphone is adequate for voice chat and plugging in a headset with an external microphone works exactly as you’d expect it to.
Connectivity is excellent with 10/100 ethernet, 802.11b/g wireless and three USB ports. There’s also a SD card slot on the left handside, with the card sitting flush with the side of the laptop. Supporting SDHC cards, this is a very viable option for expanding the onboard storage. There’s also a VGA out port that will display up to 1280×1024 on an external display with excellent acelleration. This feature alone makes the Eee far more worthwhile for serious use, as then the mediocre internal display becomes an acceptable compromise to have a tiny device to carry around, but a reasonable screen resolution while at home.
Caption: ASUS ‘easy’ interface
Software
ASUS’ customised ‘easy’ interface is built on Xandros and consists of a tabbed desktop application launcher and the IceWM window manager and panel. The interface is slick and well optimised for the low screen resolution. A ‘home’ key on the keyboard where the Windows key usually is will minimise all applications and reveal the program launcher. It’s pretty clear they anticipate most people will be running applications maximised. The launcher tabs are divided into “Internet” “Work” “Learn” “Play” “Settings” and “Favourites”.
The “Internet” tab includes launchers for Firefox, Skype and the Pidgin instant messaging client, as well as some shortcuts to load Firefox with a pre-configured page to access services like Wikipedia, various webmail providers and internet radio. The version of Skype installed does not support video chat, which we feel to be a fairly glaring omission for a device with a built-in webcam.
“Work” applications include Thunderbird for email. KDE’s Kontact suite for PIM, and Adobe’s Linux Acrobat Reader software. OpenOffice.org version 2.0 is available, and performs surprisingly well given the Eee’s limited resources. One feature that isn’t immediately apparent but is mentioned in the manual is that a terminal can be accessed with the keybinding Ctrl+Alt+T. SSH and rdesktop are two applications that can be accessed this way for those who are terminal-savvy.
Caption: Kontact’s excellent PIM suite, a little squished.
KDE’s edutainment suite is well represented under “Learn” with science, language and math-related educational tools from the project included. Tux Typing, Tux Math and Tux Paint complete the selection. With the addition of online-learning facilities, we feel the Eee would make an excellent learning aid.
The “Play” tab includes quite a few sub-categories for various types of media. A basic image viewer (Gwenview) is included, as well as an excellent Mplayer front end capable of viewing most multimedia formats. We found high quality highly compressed media content fullscreen was quite the struggle, but with a bit of practice we’re sure we can encode some video files that the Eee will play well. DVD content off an external drive plays reasonably.
We were very pleased to see some of our favourite procrastination-enablers under “Games”. Frozen-Bubble is insanely addictive, and Crack Attack looks to be coming up for second on the list of Reasons This Review Will Almost Certainly Be Late. Penguin Racer and Potato Guy are old-fashioned favourites, and Solitaire, Sudoku and and a tetris clone round out the selection.
Caption: How can a game this simple be so insanely addictive?
The “Settings” tab allows for a minimum of configurability - here are options to set up printers, configure the touchpad and check for updates among others. We eagerly looked through the personalisation dialogue but were disappointed to see it did not allow for the theme to be changed to one that does not attempt to model Microsoft Windows XP’s much hated style. The tool to enable an external display is simple and straightforward, something we certainly haven’t found on other Linux desktops.
“Favourites” allowed us to create launchers to our favourite applications, although there was no way of creating a launcher to an application that wasn’t already on another tab. The option to create a custom launcher would have been appreciated.
The first things we tried was connecting to various wireless networks, and using a usb GSM modem. For some unknown reason there are actually two networking tools installed on the eee - one that can scan and connect to wireless networks, but another one that handles all other connections and saved profiles for wireless networks. It took quite a few connections where we had to enter the key in every single time before we went looking and found the second tool, with the key saved. It seems utterly needless to have two separate tools for this when the various NetworkManager frontends are an excellent example of an all-in-one tool that’s painless to use. Hopefully we’ll see ASUS merge these tools in a later release.
Caption: Networking tools
We were utterly blown away by how easy it was to configure a USB 3G modem - the connection wizard did almost all of the work for us, and we were online within 5 minutes. Powering the modem seems to reduce the battery life to about 2.5 hours, but we were still impressed that laptop + modem are still less than 1kg to carry around. The battery life in general is a bit of a sore point - the eee gets just over 3 hours in our testing if it’s on wireless, and we feel this just isn’t really enough for an ultraportable. This said, the power adaptor for the eee is quite small, looking a little like an oversized cellphone charger. Carrying the charger as well to top the eee up whenever you happen to see a power point really doesn’t add much weight or bulk.
While we appreciate that the Eee could only include so much for the price it would have been nice to see bluetooth support and a larger screen. At the end of the day though every time we thought of something the Eee could have been improved with, we keep coming back to the price. $399, where the cheapest ultraportable from other vendors is closer to $1200 and still isn’t as small and totable as the Eee. It’s no wonder that the Eee is taking off so quickly and developing such a cult following. Out of the box it’s a compelling little appliance.
Most of the downsides of the eee are eliminated when one looks into how the machine can be customized. With some custom packages and a full Linux desktop the eee is a formidable tool for the intermediate Linux user. Speaking personally, for me the eee is 5 minutes away from being a great backup writing and open source development tool. Install subversion, add a usb HSDPA modem and now I have an extremely portable, very cheap and rugged tool for basic hacking tasks and writing articles - most of this article was written on the eee, sitting in various cafes around Wellington. With a usb to serial adaptor and the addition of minicom, now it’s a great tool to take into server rooms to aid me in my day job as a sleep-deprived systems administrator. It’s been my constant companion for the last couple of weeks, coming with me places I wouldn’t dare to risk my far more expensive and delicate Sony Vaio. Throw it in a backpack or even a large handbag and it’s ready and waiting. I’d far rather risk it having beer spilled on it at a pub hackfest, getting knocked around in my carryon luggage or being taken to conferences where I have an absolute gift for having computers stolen. $399 isn’t cheap enough to be disposable but it’s far more so than $2000.
Next month, we’ll be taking you through the various ways in which the eee can be hacked to unlock the full power of the Linux it’s running underneath, and take a look at trying out different Linux distributions on it.
Specifications:
4GB Solid State Flash Disk
512MB 400MHz DDR2 Memory
900MHz Intel Celeron Mobile
Intel 945GM Graphics
Atheros 802.11b/g wireless
9″ screen @ 800×480 resolution
3X USB 2.0 ports
Kensington Lock Slot
SD/MMC reader
VGA Out
10/100 Ethernet
Headphone & Microphone jacks
640×480 Webcam
OS: Customised Xandros
DE: IceWM, with Asus enhancements