As many of you know by now, Ceezsa and The Temptations Techpedition will be attending E3. In preparation for E3 I decided it was a good time to get a new portable PC. This purchase would become my third mobile computer purchase in the last five years. I remember this thanks to Walmart.com’s and Tigerdirect’s order history and inventory system. I won’t go into details of those two past systems but if you want more info be my guest and follow those links. Now that that is out of the way, lets spend some time with my Shiny Black 10 inch “_____”(fill in the blank).

First things first. This gadget is made to cater to a different audience. That audience being people like my parents. What I mean is, people who only need a computer to browse the internet and do some word processing from time to time. Pretty much Windows 98SE would suffice for them. Don’t get me wrong there is a little power under the hood. With some tweaking many have gotten this system to run Halo and the Unreal Tournament 2004. Well people are always getting things to do stuff they were not originally designed for. Gotta love the scalability on most PC games. I am also not gonna go into how to hack or overclock your Eee PC. That is what Google is for.

—INITIAL IMPRESSION—
Wow this thing is shiny. Yeap it comes in CSI black. However big props to Asus for actually including a cleaning cloth with the Eee PC. Another immediate observation I noticed, which many have already spoken of, is the tiny “regular keysize” right shift key. Instead moving the directional keys down one row, which there is room for, Asus opted to placed the right key directly beside the up arrow. I, being a right handed person and refusing to use proper typing 101, have always used the my right pinky finger to hit the right shift key for all my shifting duties. I have not done any extended typing on the Eee as of yet but the little I have done, I do find myself either pressing enter or pressing up. Guess its time to become Pinky Ambidextrous.

—DID NOT LIKE—
Yes, I like to get the bad out of the way first. Aside from the things I mentioned above there is another small pet peeve I have about these net books. Why do all of them only have 3 USB ports. Though I have only used one port so far as of writing this, I fail to see the logic of removing one USB port unless its internal and being used by the Wifi and/or card reader thus contradicting what I just said immediately following the comma within this statement. I would also like to see an S-Video port netbooks. My reasoning behind that is the general audience who purchases these are possibly still using TVs that might have an S-video connector on it or at least an RF modulator they bought for the their DVD player and would enjoy viewing Youtube on their CRTs or old school rear projection sets. Other than those few suggestions I do not see much fault with the Eee PC. I cannot fault its speed because I know what I was buying before I completed the purchase. That’s like wanting your 50cc scooter to do zero to sixty knowing the speedometer stops at 45 and you weigh 250 pounds. Though who knows what you could achieve with a little tweaking and Everclear.

—LOVED—
The Battery. The battery life on this thing is rated at up to 7 hours. I pretty much treat my netbook like my Nintendo DS, just close it instead of turning it off and charge it maybe once a week. This thing actually wakes up very fast from suspend as well. Its almost best to just put it to sleep instead of a full shut down/reboot. Next is the screen. I could have opted for the 8.9 inch and saved money but i just had to 1-up Liugeaux. No I am just playing. The screen is actually very bright and the WSVGA resolution is really sharp. The resolution really is the width of 95% of websites. I have only needed to scroll horizontally once. However you will do a lot vertical scrolling. Since I am talking about screen I must now talk about the multi-touch touch pad. This touch has the ability to recognize 3 separate points of interaction. Pretty much all of the Iphone multi-touch features are available plus a few. There is the pinch for zooming and the two finger turn for rotation. It also has a three finger up for my computer and a three finger down for alt tab then horizontal movement for application selection. Very fun feature to play with. I discovered that a two finger quick tap simulated a mouse scroll wheel click or mouse button three press.

—CONCLUSION—
The Asus Eee is definitely not for the “hardcore” gamer nor is it for the video editor or music studio buff. Its not packing enough power to make doing those sort of task on it feasible. What it is meant to be is your ultra portable web browser word processor. Bear in mind it does have enough power to emulate PSOne and back. It can also play most top end PC games from 2004 and back. Playing web games and flash is also not a problem for this machine. If you are in the market for a laptop and do not need a lot of power then buy my old laptop . If you also want extreme portability and spectacular battery life then buy you a netbook(Eee’s touted as netbooks with best battery life). Their prices are coming down everyday and specs going up everyday. Just check out the video below of the next Eee on the horizon. Very Apple-ish style.

4.5/5.0