Impressions of Asus EEE laptop in Currys digital.

I saw the Asus EEE laptop in Currys Digital (aka Dixons) yesterday whilst bored on The Strand, and got my first actual hands-on with it.
First impressions of the laptop - it's a shame that the screen doesnt fill the top half (although soon to be remedied it seems) as it's quite small, but sharp and quite readable.
The keyboard seemed small though - tried to type "The quick brown fox jumped...." and missed a letter or two, but maybe with time i'd adjust. There wasnt a huge amount of travel on the keys which might have made it more difficult. Not sure about that.
Open Office booted up reasonably quickly, it didnt feel overall like there was loads of lag. Same with firefox.
It did also seem (nice &) small and portable, light etc which is all good.

The price didnt seem too far off either - £229 ish (from memory) for the 2 Gig version (boo) and £249 for the 4 Gig with webcam (yay).

And Currys were actually promoting it too, with a sign in the shop window and a prominent place in the shop. Personally i hope it gets lots of business, but i'll be waiting for the higher res model.

I agree on the keyboard. It's difficult to adjust and I'm often missing letters when typing too. I find it faster to type with a single finger than to attempt to touch type or semi-touch type.

I'm not a big fan of them personally. On the plus side it appears that to clone them in corporate set ups is no effort whatsoever. We've got some to play with at the moment and have just ordered 10 more (with more to follow), so obviously setting one up and then cloning it is getting quite important. With Windows you'd use Sysprep & Ghost/True Image or RIS, but with these it seems it's just backup one and restore it on another. Only gripe is that True Image Workstation 9 doesn't recognise the network card, so I'm having to use a USB hard drive. Hardly a critical issue.

Got Windows sharing set up now too (the main issue this non-Linux using hack had).

Played with one today - the white one. can't really go wrong for that price. Wicked-cool size man. It's not meant to replace your media/gaming stations.

I had a go in currys down the road last weekend, I was quite impressed by the sound actually. I fired up a game on it not realising what the volume was set to. It was a 3D penguin slegding thing. I also had a play with the wifi networking settings and open office... they are tidy little things, although there was a lot of greasy finger marks on the display model understandably.

Thinking of getting one of these for field work now actually... very tempting.

I was thinking of getting one in a few months time.
My use for it would be a sidekick for Digital photography. Do you think it would be powerful enough to run some minor photo editing software (such as PS elements, or maybe an older version of Photoshop)?
I'm going to be getting a Canon 450D, which has a program in which you can hook you digital camera upto a computer and use the computer as a "live view", focusing the camera, changing setting, and even taking photo's and storing them to the HDD (or flash drive).

Would the EEE be upto this? They look awesome!

(edit: i would be installing windows on it)

For photo use I would go for a used smallish standard laptop, having the higher screen res will make your life a lot easier. The company I work for are currently swapping out their old T40 series laptops, they seem to be going for just over £200. Couple of thousand will be hittiing the market in total, many end up on ebay after being bought by the pallet load.

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Originally Posted by Flibb

For photo use I would go for a used smallish standard laptop, having the higher screen res will make your life a lot easier. The company I work for are currently swapping out their old T40 series laptops, they seem to be going for just over £200. Couple of thousand will be hittiing the market in total, many end up on ebay after being bought by the pallet load.

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thanks for the heads up. Ill keep my eye open.

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Originally Posted by DecomposingStar

Do you think it would be powerful enough to run some minor photo editing software (such as PS elements, or maybe an older version of Photoshop)?

Would the EEE be upto this? They look awesome!

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In my view it would not be good for this, as it at the moment, for 3 reasons:

The processor is slow, although that would only take time and be a bit annoying.

The screen resolution wouldnt really show you THAT much more than a good rear screen on a camera (sorry, i dont know yours).

The killer factor for me though is the memory, both in terms of RAM and storage (SSD) - 1/2 Gig of RAM would make it crawl if you want to edit any photos over a couple of meg in size (and that's if you edit jpegs, never mind RAW, BMP or whatever).
And then saving them, you only have 4 Gig to play with (OK, you mention external drive, but you dont want to be saving it off every 2 or 3 photos).

However, all of these appear to be addressed in the revised future model - processor will be better (not necessarily in the next EEE, but either the MSI model or the ASUS after that), RAM will be 1 Gig, and crucially the SSD will be significantly better at 12 to 20 Gig (depending on model).
Plus of course the better screen resolution, which for me personally would become the first useable resolution.

I played with one the other day in PC World - while the small keyboard would take a little getting used to, I can see it being a useful tool to certain on-the-road professions or a handy auxiliary computer to a main workstation.

The major downside, especially considering it's ultra-portability, is very average battery life, and it isn't improving with the new Eee 900 either, though a larger battery will be optional.

Been using this little beauty for 5 months now. Very happy and easy to whip out in lecture theatres and trains (thnx National express). typing is now a doodle after a few days which coincidentally was when I packed up linux for windows, loading in a tidy 24 secs. Although I shouldn't I have been using 3ds max and Photoshop on it :P Can't wait for the larger model as this has been a life saver.