Sunday, January 27, 2008

My sister's EEE-PC

Lucky my sister has small fingers. I can't imagine myself using this thing for work. The keys on the keyboard are so small and the screen though bright and clear is just too small. I guess that's the adjective that best describes this machine. It's small but it's just fine for my sister who happens to be just as petite ;-)

The unit is the PC-701 model equipped with a 1.3 megapixel webcam, 1GB memory and a 4 GB solid state hard disk with Xandros Linux pre-installed.

Three days before purchase I called to ask if there were available units. The sales person I spoke with said they had 75 units available but he added that these things were selling like hotcakes. When we finally dragged ourselves to the store, there were only 3 units left, he wasn't kidding !!!

I had a chance to play with it for about an hour and here are my first impressions.
  • Boot up is fast. No doubt, due to the solid state hard disk. It beat my T61 to the login screen.
  • The posters and flyers say its "Shock Proof - Weather Proof - Best in Class !". I'm inclined to agree, it feels solid and it's light. It feels like you can actually throw it around without worry.
  • It's linux of course, so the apps were all familiar linux apps like Pidgin, OpenOffice and Firefox, nothing any linux user hasn't seen.
  • Applications were quite responsive. Skype worked out of the box with the webcam.
  • There's a voice command app but I didn't get a chance to try it out yet.
Here are a couple of photos from my camera phone. The last two shots give you a feeling of how exactly small it is.


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2 comments:

  1. Wow ham that EEEPC looks nice and its dark gray. And you said that Skype for linux has now support for video?

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  2. Hi Jun,

    Ah I think it's more black than dark gray. The manual says its black :-)

    There's an all white version too.

    I believe skype has supported webcams and video for a while now. The Skype version on the EEE is 2.0

    I don't have a webcam on my desktop but I was able to activate the webcam/video feature so when chatting I could see a streaming video from the EEE.

    Best,

    Ham

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