I have bought an Eee PC. I chose the white 2 Gb one. It is a brilliant gadget - with quirks. This is what I've noticed:
The good:- Brilliant price. Super small, light, feels solid, looks nice, starts quick. On-button to fully functional in 30 seconds. Off in 5 seconds.
- The keyboard gave me finger trouble at first but I'm used to it now and it's pretty good. The trackpad is fine and the vertical scrolling function at the side of the trackpad is often useful. Works great with an external screen, USB keyboard and USB mouse. 1024x768 resolution appears like magic on an external screen.
- Wireless networking has worked fine for me so far. Doing wireless surveys with the Eee PC is a treat. Wired networking works fine.
- Endlessly customisable. Maximum twiddle factor (features that are fun to play with and possibly useful). Fantastic "eeeuser.com" wiki and forums. A whole world of Linuxy goodness to explore. The ability to zap the computer back to its factory configuration with the F9 key during boot is brilliant and works in 1 second flat. First thing I did with the help of "eeeuser" was replace the default "Easy" desktop with IceWM, like so:
The bad:- YouTube videos sometimes hang the Firefox browser when you click the Back button, ie when you navigate in YouTube back from a page containing a video, to another page that also contains a video. This is the worst fault I have found. The only way to proceed is to kill the Firefox processes or restart the machine.
- The Eee PC is quite a bit hotter than I thought it was going to be. Processor temperature reaches 60 degrees and you can feel the heat through the keyboard which is a disappointment.
- Battery life, 2 and a bit hours? I fully charged it up, then before I knew it said "Battery charge is low" and I thought, "Already?"
- 2 Gb model only has 350 Mb free storage space for user data and additional programs. OK so I knew the 2 Gb solid-state hard drive is used for a backup copy of its own data but I didn't realise it would be that much.
And the quirky:- The "Easy" tabbed interface, well I got tired of that very quickly. It is, er, characterful. Asus haven't really thought it through. Some icons are like folders, leading to another pageful of icons, but they don't look like folders. Some applications, such as Photo Manager, appear full-screen the first time launched but then only part-screen on the second occasion. File Manager appears on Work tab but not on Play tab, even though you still need to manage files when at Play.
- It's a bit irksome that there's no option to "Show characters while typing" while entering a long WEP or WPA key. I wish I didn't have to keep pressing the "Refresh" button on the list of wireless networks.
- The frame-rate when playing YouTube videos is not brilliant but acceptable. Processor (CPU) usage while playing YouTube videos is over 60% which isn't very healthy. I think this caused by is the relatively slow processor combined with Adobe's notoriously inefficient Flash streaming-video implementation on Linux.
- There's no LED light on the Ethernet socket. I miss that LED because it is useful when you've got a dodgy Ethernet cable.
- No dial-up modem built-in. I still need dial-up sometimes. To get a USB dial-up modem to work with the factory Xandros Linux, you have to be very careful which modem you get and you have to customise the Eee's software using the advice on eeeuser.
- The version of the Firefox browser is 2.0.0.9 which is old now. I haven't figured out how to upgrade it.
- Default fonts in terminal "xterm" far too small for me. That was the first thing I had to change.
- I chose the 2 Gb Eee, not 4 Gb. I found it absolutely littered with references to software that isn't installed. For instance, the Photo Manager program contains menu item "Edit photo with - The Gimp" but The Gimp is only installed by default on the 4 Gb.
