Well, today, I got an ASUS Eee PC 901. I’m totally jumping on this netbook bandwagon.
For me, I’ve found that I actually don’t need all that much power. In fact, I have a ~5-year-old laptop with a 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 M processor. The Eee 901 has a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom, which is (technically) 400 MHz slower. These days, speed is much of a muchness. It is more about making power usage more efficient, and becoming more mobile.
The laptop I currently have is a 15-inch Evo N610c, which I simply find too bulky to lug around. I find that when I’m going somewhere where I want to crunch bits but don’t want to be burdened with lugging a laptop around, I take my OLPC XO-1 with me, which powers on from standby in less than a second, and can instantly connect to a wireless access point. However, this is abuse of my XO, as it is not really practical as a mobile workstation, which I often use it as one (in addition to hacking on Sugar).
So, the Eee 901 fulfils my desire for increased mobility perfectly. I’ll find invaluable the Intel 945 graphics, solid state drive, webcam, Bluetooth, WiFi (802.11n), and the ginormous 8-hour battery life. It’ll be able to do everything I can do with my current laptop, and more.
I’ve installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix (referred to me by Jeff Waugh), which is a super-slick user interface for Ubuntu designed for small screens. I’ve already tried out the Remix on my existing laptop (though running it on a 15-inch screen is a bit of a waste), and it performs well, and looks awesome.
I’m totally impressed with this laptop’s performance. I connected it up to my VGA monitor, and ran a fullscreen video at 1280×1024 — perfectly smooth playback. Also, I was quickly able to start an Ekiga video chat using the in-built webam.
The things that didn’t work out of the box in Ubuntu were the function key shortcuts (e.g. brightness/volume controls), the WiFi, and the webcam. Getting the webcam working was easy — it is simply disabled in the BIOS by default (I presume to ensure user privacy). Getting the keyboard shortcuts and WiFI was fixed in one fell swoop by installing the linux-eeepc-lean kernel from the Array.org Eee PC Ubuntu Repository, which adds hardware support for the Eee’s devices.
