Asus eee review
by Pierre Boisvenue. November 9, 2007
After thinking about it for several weeks, I decide it was time to finally purchase the product here in Ottawa at PC Cyber for $399 Canadian. To give you a sense of the size, simply take a 8 ½” by 11” sheet of paper and fold in half, this is roughly the size of the unit closed. Follows is a snapshot of the eee beside a regular size book.
To be noted is that this device is being marketed towards the average consumer as a general purpose personal portable
laptop and should give Apple’s consumer product such as the iPod Touch a difficult time. Why? first it has a 7” screen,
runs Linux, is non Proprietary, accepts secure digital SD media and any USB device you care to throw at it.
The applications are many, more than 40 software applications such as the capability to browse the internet
wirelessly and watch any kind of video movie and audio formats you may wish to play. The unit is so lightweight and quiet, it’s a delight.
The reactions, after showing it to a few co workers said a lot. As I said in a previous article
I believe that this release from Asus is significant in that it will reach a lot of consumers having simple needs. Now mind you this is no game or development machine having just 512 Megs of RAM and 4 GIG of solid state disk powered by
an Intel Celeron. Graphics wise at 800X480 resolutions allows for DVD quality images.
Being able to connect wirelessly to my windows XP via a share drive was a surprised and could even stream video content. However this scenario is not acceptable at DVD quality but is at a lower framerate and resolution. The SMplayer included in the Xandros Linux distribution is impeccable in playing back movies from Xvid, Mpeg4 and Mpeg just to name a few. The tactile feel of the keyboard is right along with
the configurable touchpad.
The asus pc701 eee price point is what really break it appart from the other expensive solutions geared towards the upper echelon by being
affordable and user friendly. In regards to Secure Digital SDHC card with a capacity greater than 4 Gig I think it important to state the Microsoft Windows XP SP2 and windows VISTA does not natively support them. What is unusual also is that a so called HOTFIX is available for XP but one must ask Microsoft for it and have yet to get a response. Anyone know where I can get the Hot Fix?. I tried the 8Gig SDHC in Vista with no luck as well. However I am happy to report that the Asus EEE can use them natively. Based on the recommended cards from the asus guide I went for a class 6 card and so far copy files on the asus from USB to SDHC as a work around. For those of you interested in getting a sense for the dimensions and usability a youtube video will follow shorlty.
My score for the Asus PC701 eee is
Asus eee, Ultra portable, iPod iTouch
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