More On The Eee PC

I’ve had the Eee PC for a few weeks now, using it as my main com­puter for most of that time, and have been jot­ting down notes on using it all along. Instead of a thor­ough review (see Ars Technica’s cov­er­age for that), I thought I’d gussy those notes up a bit, to make a loose, bullet-​pointy, rather vague reviewlet of the machine as I use it, for writ­ing and research, mostly.

Using The Eee PC

• Writ­ing on the Eee PC is do-​able, but imprac­ti­cal when it comes to longer pieces. When writ­ing any­thing over a few hun­dred words, I tend to have two text files open and vis­i­ble on screen, one full of notes, half-​formed para­graphs jotted down as they pop into my head and a rough out­line, the other for the actual busi­ness of writ­ing the piece. This is impos­si­ble on the Eee PC’s little screen, and I found it very hard to adapt to flit­ting between two fullscreen doc­u­ments, rather than having both avail­able for read­ing and writ­ing simul­ta­ne­ously. When it comes to the final pass, which for me tends to involve a fair bit of cut­ting, past­ing and rewrit­ing of the first draft, the Eee PC’s small dis­play is even more both­er­some: I had no idea how impor­tant it is for me to be able to read large chunks of text in their entirety on screen, but it turns out that all the to and fro of scrolling required, even when using Abi­Word in fullscreen mode with a dis­play font set at the limits of leg­i­bil­ity, really gets in the way of fin­ish­ing a piece of work.

• That said, it’s amaz­ing how quickly one can adapt to writ­ing on the Eee PC: I now type almost as quickly on the dinky key­board as I do on my Mac­Book Pro, though with many more errors, and have absorbed a huge number of key­board com­mands. This is a prob­lem as much as a pos­i­tive, though - every time I switch between the Mac and the Eee PC I spend five min­utes or so adrift, stum­bling over the Com­mand and Con­trol keys, and some things are so ingrained (trig­ger­ing Tex­tex­pander macros or launch­ing Quick­sil­ver for exam­ple) that I sus­pect my brain will never over­ride my muscle memory.

• Web brows­ing is just fine. The over­whelm­ing major­ity of sites I visit render per­fectly on the dinky dis­play, and the scrolling side of the track­pad makes nav­i­gat­ing pages a cinch. I have noticed one big dif­fer­ence in my brows­ing habits, though. On the Eee PC, if I come across a page of inter­est, I’ll print it to a PDF file for later read­ing, rather than leave the tab open. On the Mac, I would rou­tinely have 20 or more tabs open, some­thing the under­pow­ered Eee just can’t handle, but I’ve now ported the habit over: it’s better to have an easily search­able folder of PDF print-​outs than grub around for that tab I opened last Tues­day. Flash-​heavy sites, and too many open tabs bear­ing YouTube videos will cause Fire­fox to choke on the Eee PC, but since I avoid the former, and could do with watch­ing less of the latter, this hasn’t proved to be a problem.

• Man­ag­ing images is tricky. I had thought that the Eee PC would be ideal as a photographer’s com­pan­ion, so to speak, but the small screen makes even light edit­ing - cropp­ping, resiz­ing, etc. - a chore, and the ten­dency of Fire­fox to have a fit when upload­ing more than a couple of full-​size images to Flickr is frus­trat­ing. Still, for dump­ing images off your camera’s SD card for later pro­cess­ing or quick upload­ing, the Eee PC is a lot easier to lug around than your aver­age laptop (it fits in the front pocket of my camera bag, with room to spare).

• Every­thing else is on the web. As I men­tioned before, using the Eee PC often feels like using a client to Google’s var­i­ous ser­vices (or other web ser­vices and hosted appli­ca­tions, like Back­pack and its sister apps). This feels like the real­i­sa­tion of a long-​predicted trend: the iPhone, the Eee PC, the Newton and the better UMPC type things really are a new class of net­worked portable device, I think, capa­ble of chang­ing the way we use com­put­ers and the web. If only the net­work was ubiq­ui­tous, and if only I were will­ing to trust all my data to third parties.

Hardware

• Wire­less net­work­ing is solid, but not per­fect. When out and about, the Eee PC picks up more avail­able net­works than my Mac­Book Pro, but some­times has trou­ble con­nect­ing and main­tain­ing con­nec­tions, espe­cially to those with a weak signal. (After an annoy­ing after­noon in windswept Leeds trying to get online, get­ting the Eee PC to dial up via my Nokia N95, or even invest­ing in one of those pay-​as-​you-​go USB 3G modem thingys has become a priority.)

• Stor­age is a big prob­lem. There’s just no room on the Eee PC for many media files, unless you want to muck about remov­ing appli­ca­tions and files the Eee would rather you left alone. The answer? Get a for a 16GB SD card for Christmas!

• Bat­tery life is noth­ing to be sniffed at, espe­cially if you turn off WiFi and dim the back­light as much as you can stand. I got the train from Liv­er­pool to Glas­gow on Monday, and watched two and a half hours of down­loaded telly, lis­tened to a bunch of Radio 4 stuff gleaned from Speechi­fi­ca­tion, and read a week’s worth of RSS feeds in Google Reader’s offline mode. The Eee PC had enough juice left for me to check my mail and footle about on the web for half an hour when I got home.

The operating system

• Linux is ugly, and hard to use. I don’t think I’ll ever be com­fort­able with the incon­sis­ten­cies of the user inter­face. On a Mac, I know where cer­tain menu items will be found, and can count on stan­dard com­mand key combos doing what I expect, regard­less of the appli­ca­tion I’m using. Under Xan­dros, there are no such cer­tain­ties, and you have to learn a dis­tinct set of com­mands, and a new menu layout for pretty much every appli­ca­tion you run. Even some­thing as basic as quit­ting an app is com­pletely incon­sis­tent across appli­ca­tions - Con­trol + Q will work a lot of the time, admit­tedly, but you can’t count on it. Talk­ing of which, who thought it was a good idea to have appli­ca­tions up and quit when you close a window? That’s just incred­i­bly stupid behav­iour (if you’ve been using Macs exclu­sively for more than a decade). I’ve even found myself aban­don­ing the GUI of some appli­ca­tions in favour of the com­mand line, which is fine by me, but pretty bloody ridiculous.

• Linux also has its strengths, of course! Pack­age man­age­ment is just the absolute busi­ness, a bril­liant model for installing, updat­ing and unin­stalling appli­ca­tions. Updat­ing all my appli­ca­tions on the Mac to the latest ver­sion would take a good deal of Googling, down­load­ing, delet­ing and installing. Typing apt-get upgrade is a cinch in comparison.

• The twin OS that ships with the Eee PC is a good thing. Kate, James and I got my Dad an Eee PC for Christ­mas: he’s stick­ing with the default Easy Mode inter­face and, so far, the default appli­ca­tions. Admit­tedly, he’s a geeky pen­sioner, sorry Silver Surfer — Flickr account, nascent weblog and all — but I’d guess that some­one with next to no com­put­ing expe­ri­ence would be com­fort­able with it. In other words, Asus have made a desk­top Linux distro that anyone can use out of the box, with­out even having to look at a ter­mi­nal window. This does not match my expe­ri­ence with other Linux dis­tros, and that’s putting it mildly. (Of course, they have the ‘Apple advantage’ here, match­ing their hard­ware with a bespoke OS.)

So, is it any good?

Yup! In the end, the Eee PC has far exceeded my expec­ta­tions. Sure, it has its flaws - small screen and key­board, the lack of polish and lim­i­ta­tions of Xan­dros when com­pared to a ‘proper’ OS - but it’s a more than capa­ble laptop, ultra-​portable and emi­nently usable. It has com­pletely replaced my Mac­Book Pro as a laptop, which is now installed in the office as a desk­top replace­ment. At a push, I could even see some­one with rel­a­tively modest com­put­ing needs making the Eee PC their main machine: add an exter­nal DVD drive, full-​size key­board and mon­i­tor, and it would more than meet the needs of anyone who uses a PC pri­mar­ily to write, surf the web and manage mail.

See also: Eee PC Setup.

Posted at 4pm on 10/01/08 by Jack Mottram to the linux category.
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Tags: eeepc, google, writing