Glenn Reynolds has a pretty fair review of the nine inch Asus Eee PC up at Pajamas Media. Now, I have not used this version, nor have I tried to use the seven inch model extensively, but this is my take on it from playing around with it in a store.
The seven inch model was all but unusable if you don't have small hands. Add onto that the problems with trying to run a regular desktop environment on such a small screen. The nine inch model is probably bearable in both respects now, but it costs $550 and sports ridiculously underpowered hardware. Take a gander at what $550 will buy you at Dell.com. If you are willing to spend twice that much, you can get an entry-level MacBook with free shipping, that is significantly more powerful than this mini laptop, and that isn't particularly big either at thirteen inches.
This is more of a novelty for those with the dispoable income to buy a laptop whose primary claim to fame is being tiny. In terms of usefulness and longevity, you would be insane to buy a current generation Eee PC for your primary computer, especially if you don't have a lot of money to throw around.
The seven inch model was all but unusable if you don't have small hands. Add onto that the problems with trying to run a regular desktop environment on such a small screen. The nine inch model is probably bearable in both respects now, but it costs $550 and sports ridiculously underpowered hardware. Take a gander at what $550 will buy you at Dell.com. If you are willing to spend twice that much, you can get an entry-level MacBook with free shipping, that is significantly more powerful than this mini laptop, and that isn't particularly big either at thirteen inches.
This is more of a novelty for those with the dispoable income to buy a laptop whose primary claim to fame is being tiny. In terms of usefulness and longevity, you would be insane to buy a current generation Eee PC for your primary computer, especially if you don't have a lot of money to throw around.
As a side note, the Eee PC fanboys were mocking those of us who said that a regular laptop is a better deal by saying that the Eee PC weighs about 2lb which is a lot less than what a $550 laptop from Toshiba or Dell would weigh. Yeah? Those guys never looked at Apple's product line, did they? My new MacBook Pro, which has a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM, 160GB hdd and a GeForce 8600 w/ 256MB of VRAM, weighs 5.5lb. Oooh. 3.5lb more. My arm is getting sore just thinking about that...
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