Eee!

As astute viewers of my Flickr photostream will know, I've recently got a very, very cool gadget - an Asus Eee PC. Here's a photo of it on my lap...

It's probably the tiniest little laptop you'll have seen in your life, but it's a real computer - at its heart is an Intel Celeron processor, the same as you get in 'proper' computers, and it has 512Mb of RAM and 4Gb of 'hard drive' (a bit of a fib, seeing as it's all flash memory inside, or what those in the know call Solid State Drive). Its sole moving part is a tiny fan that kicks in when it needs a bit of a breather. And, like its meatier brethren, it can run Windows XP (if you're that way inclined) or Linux, which is what it comes with. For something so small, and of such negligible power compared to big, full blown PCs, it's remarkably fast. Mine boots up to the desktop in 20 seconds - far faster than any Windows PC I use, even my Toshiba laptop which is kept in a hibernate state so as to allow faster start up. And Firefox, the web browser within, starts in less than 5 seconds - again, faster than anything else I regularly use. OpenOffice starts impressively quickly as well. The use of flash memory as its drive means you can turn it off, close the lid and sling it in your bag without worrying - there's not going to be any drive head crashes (not like the last two iPods I've fixed). The keyboard, although small, is perfectly adequate - and I found myself able to touch type on it, albeit not at my usual speed. Above the monitor is a VGA-quality webcam which can be used with the bundled Skype application for video calls, or just to take little videos and things. It copes well, even in low light, which is impressive. Also impressive is the number of ports on such a little device. There's three USB ports, and hackers have managed to find and enable two more internally. To the left there's headphone and microphone sockets, complementing the built in stereo speakers and front-mounted microphone, as well as an Ethernet network socket and an (unused) modem port. To the right you find a VGA output, to hook up to an external monitor, and an SD card slot, which can be used to pull photos straight off a digital camera, for example, or used to expand the amount of storage from 4Gb to something a little more substantial. I found that Play.com have a 4Gb SDHC card for £12.99 (which is a complete bargain), but some people have been loading up 16Gb SDHC cards to bring it up to 20Gb of storage without voiding the warranty.

Warranty voiding - and slightly bending with Asus' permission - has become a bit of a pastime for some Eee owners. These things are remarkably hackable! The simplest thing being done is increasing the memory, up to a maximum of 2Gb, which Asus in their wisdom have decided won't void the warranty (despite having to break a warranty seal to get in there). More extreme is the hacking of the internal USB ports, which has seen internal Bluetooth dongles, flash drives, GPS dongle and much more being squeezed into the diminutive case. At £220, these things are an absolute bargain - a cheap, capable computer that can cope with pretty much anything you throw at it. It comes with a fantastic user base as well - the first site to bookmark for users is EeeUser.com, where everybody is chipping in with help and advice (myself included) on its forums and wiki. With a guide for an older version I managed to compile and install the Fuse Spectrum Emulator, and am working on updating the guide to cover all the gotchas I found along the way.

These aren't aimed at hackers though, they're aimed at anyone - anyone at all. Research Machines sell them into schools and sold several thousand in a single week, which is an astonishing amount. Their everyman feel is exemplified by the fact that Asus (and Xandros who put together the custom Linux operating system for them) have made all the windows look as much like Windows XP windows as possible, to put people at ease with a little familiarity. In my opinion, Asus have found their iPod. It's already the most successful product the company has ever made (and they're quite big in the Far East, making mobile phones and all sorts), and the imagination has been captured. I'd happily replace my Eee with another, later model in a few years, and a lot of other people would too. It's a remarkable feat - a tiny computer with a tiny price - when you consider that until very recently you had to pay a significant premium for ultra-mobile laptops, like the tiny Sony Vaios. In case you can't tell, I'm quite smitten.