The Eee PC

I'm currently carrying around an Acer notebook computer. It's a 1.86 Core 2 Duo with a 2GB RAM. It's a rocket. And even though it's comparatively light, my daily commuting means I need to lug around quite a heavy load. And this made me look for an ultra light or an ultra portable. And since I'm a huge Acer fan, I looked at Acer's 2920Z which is a high end ultra portable. And the other is to do with a novel concept: The Asus EeePC.

The Eee PC is not an ultra portable. It's in a new niche called sub note books. These are not powerhouses, but something of barebones work oriented notebooks with exceptional levels of mobility. The name Eee PC, comes from Asus' vision for it: Easy to learn, Easy to work, Easy to play.

There are three models to choose from, based mainly on the hard disk capacity. The hard disk is also something to talk about, as all three options featured are Solid State Drives, with no moving parts. This means the unit is highly resistant to knocks and bumps, and even drops. This is the same kind of technology that is used in your USB drive.

The "high end" model is the Eee PC 8G, which as the name suggests has an 8GB SSD. Included in the nifty packaging is a 900MHz Intel Celeron M processor, 1GB RAM, in-built VGA camera. The display is a 7-inch unit with 800x480 resolution running on Intel's 900 GMA series graphics chipset. The graphics card supports resolutions upto 1600x1280 via a traditional VGA port.

Asus is pretty serious about the concept, and the actual product. This is displayed by the development of a completely new Linux based operating system running on KDE, called Xandros. Since the launch in October 2007, Asus has sold over 300,000 units, and have plans of selling a million units this year.

Wrapping up, it's not a replacement PC. It's not powerful enough to handle demanding applications such as Photoshop, and watching movies in that teeny little screen will not deliver the experience the movie directors wanted. But as a second notebook to carry around when either you're flying or driving, it seems a pretty good investment. Plus it looks very techy.