Harnessing the power of the Atom

Last night was the Christmas party of my work and as is tradition with them they make it an event to remember. Aside from the band, the food and the Karaoke there was a awesome gift involved. Every employee received an Asus Eee PC 900 series.

This puppy is really a marvel of technology. Running on an Intel Atom processor at 1.6GHz this minuscule computer feels about as fast as any laptop, except it has much better battery life. This particular models also comes with 1GB of work memory and a 16GB SSD, not to mention a 8,9″ screen running at 1024×600, with such sharpness pixels might make your eyes bleed.

Of course with reduced size comes some downsides as well. The biggest one being the absence of an optical station. If you want one, you need to get an external one. Of course with an SD-card reader, wired and wireless network connectors and multiple USB connectors one could wonder if that is really a big issue. One can of course wonder how smart it is of Asus to supply a rescue CD when  but it provokes the question why Asus does supply a rescue CD for the device.

And with reduced size also comes a smaller keyboard. If you think you can start of straight away typing essays think again. The smaller size keyboard takes a little getting used to. However once you start to get the hang of it, it is not much dissimilar from a normal keyboard.

16 GB of storage might also seem like a bit of a problem, but Asus was smart  enough to preinstall software for remote storage service. You can technically store all of your excess data on a remote service. Of course you need to accept a EULA that restricts your freedom to some extend what you can and what you should not store. In short don’t go and save your potentially illegal MP3 library to these guys. 😉

The machine itself runs (to my best knowledge) Ubuntu, and has a rather pleasantly simplified GUI which allows even the ‘n00besk’ user to use this device with a certain degree of efficiency.  The theme looks a lot like a standard Windows XP look, which helps people feel as much familiar with the GUI as possible.

The  machine is shipped with a few applications, most of which are recognizable by Windows desktop users.
Firefox, Open Office, Skype and a MSN-like messenger client all have made it to the selection. All of these applications have been organized in “Internet”, “Work”, “Learn”, and “Play” tabs. There is also a “Favorites” tab, which you can use to place your most frequently used Application icons.

More advanced users (like myself) might find it a bit restricted (to the point you consider yourself confined to a playing pen). Do not despair though, because with just a few actions easy for the Linux-savvy you can have an advanced KDE interface at your disposal. With a simple press of a hotkey, you have shell access and can do whatever you want with your Linux distribution.

To wrap things up, I am rather impressed with this small but strong piece of engineering. Roughly half the size of my laptop yet on many levels on par regarding capabilities. It has left me impressed beyond a measure I’d thought possible.

For those who have recently bought one, here are some useful links:

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