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Now that I have had my Asus EEE for a week and have taken it for a test run in the field I think it's time to jot down some thoughts.



The EEE pc is one of the most satisfying buys ever. It weighs nothing. I don't even feel I'm carrying it. Despite that, it doesn't look cheap or feel like a toy. (I can't vouch for the other colours, but the black version looks like an ordinary laptop. Just a lot smaller.) There's no reason not to pop it into my bag and take it everywhere I go.

It works (after plugging it in and/or charging it) out of the box, starts up in 10 to 15 seconds, has a preinstalled interface that anyone can understand, comes with oodles of software including games, an open source office suite, Firefox, Thunderbird, excellent WiFi, a photo viewer/slideshow, screen capture, a news reader, IM client, Skype, etc, etc.

While I'm not completely new to Linux, I'm not that familiar with it either. I use *nix commands on the server that hosts my sites, but my home and work desktop PCs have always run Windows or a Mac OS. So I don't know much about the various incarnations of Linux.

The EEE runs a custom Asus version of Xandros by default. Once I switched from the 'Easy' desktop environment to Advanced it looks a lot like a rip off of Windows XP - which is almost disappointing. It's not the most exciting look. But I didn't know Linux GUI's were this advanced. I thought there'd be more command line stuff to get to grips with, but you get lots of menus and right click options, just like in XP. Again... that's almost disappointing. I guess that's why they called it "EEE, Easy to learn, work and play".

The trackpad does the job, but isn't great for prolonged usage. It is small and the left and right click button feels a little stiff. I plugged in an old mouse which worked really well, so I bought a nice small notebook mouse from Microsoft which works even better. The keyboard could have been better too. I have to hit the space bar pretty hard to make it work and I find touch typing difficult in any other position than seated at a desk.

I mentioned switching to the Advanced desktop. Out of the box, the EEE starts up with an 'Easy' interface, which is just a couple of tabs with large icons on it. If you want to get the most out of the machine, use the Advanced desktop. It used to be an option on the menu, but Asus decided to market the machine as an appliance rather than a pc, so they took the option out. You have to put it back in. It's pretty easy to do, following these instructions: 'Enable Advanced Desktop mode' from the eeeuser.com wiki. Note that personalising the EEE environment almost always involves opening a terminal window and doing some command line stuff. So stick to Easy mode if that scares you.

The EEE can play quite a few different video formats, even .mkv files, although there were some synch problems with the file I tried. What the EEE can't do is play the ipod compatible formats, mp4/quicktime h.264. But no worries, if you downgrade the supplied mplayer, it will play those as well.

Firefox is preinstalled but the browser's chrome will dominate a large part of the tiny screen. You'll have to fiddle with settings a bit to make better use of your real estate. In fact, Opera seems to be the better choice, especially if you use that browser's fit-to-width option. You'll have to install Opera and then customise it following instructions from the the eeeuser.com wiki to make the most of the space you have.

To make your EEE a portable jukebox, ideally you'd want to install a bittorrent client, but I haven't got round to that. I tried a Firefox torrent extension, but could not get it to work. For now I've settled for a Limewire clone called Frostwire. I'm not a big fan of the Gnutella protocol, since I prefer the high quality rips found elsewhere, but it will have to do for now.

Wrapping up this review, the Asus EEE is a fantastic little computer. If you get one, spend some time customising it with help from the EEE user community. Buy a small mouse. You'll need at least some extra storage so one or two SD cards will come in handy, and/or a USB flash stick. And remember, if your system dies while you're customising it, you can easily revert to factory settings by hitting F9 during start up.

Photographers should consider this set up for a great portable storage and post-processing solution.

Sometimes I wish I was an OS-nazi. I'm not. I appreciate Windows and the abundance of software available to it as much as I like the neat structure of OS X. I admire Apple's design as much as I don't care about a tool's aesthetics. I like that you can buy an expensive beautiful, functional object, or go for raw power for peanuts. But it all makes it harder to choose what to buy.

I think the current iMac is ugly and the Mac Pro too expensive. I considered doing away with desktops completely and getting a really good laptop. The MacBooks are so tempting, but perhaps not powerful enough, the Pro's... really, I'm not prepared to lay down that much cash. And since I already have two (old) laptops, getting a third seemed extravagant. I want the old ones to break down before I upgrade. So... Macs were out, laptop out, PCs were in. A new dilemma. Intel Pentium, or AMD Athlon? Brand or brandless?

In the end, money talks and practicality motivates. 1. I didn't want to spend too much. 2. The only memory-sucking tasks I do are image editing in Photoshop and some audio encoding. 3. I don't play games.

AMD is a little cheaper, but the Pentium chips out-perform Athlon when it comes to Photoshop (even the Pentium D apprently does better than Athlon's dual cores), so I needed an Intel based machine with a card reader, a big harddisk, a run of the mill graphics card. No need for a sound card, I still have an unused Soundblaster Audigy 2.

After much agonising I decided I didn't want Vista on the machine. I have been using it at work and the number of programs that failed to work on it was frightening. So the Acer machines I'd been looking at were off the list. In fact, all brand PC's were off the list since they all come with Vista pre-installed.

I finally ended up with an offer from 'Computerland', next to 'Paradigit' and 'MyCom' and all the other hardware stores on Ceintuurbaan, Amsterdam's own mini-Tottenham Court Road. Conveniently located  about three stops up the road, across the river, on the tram line that goes through my street. Yes, it did feature on the ' pro's ' list when I bought the house.

Was the net slow for you yesterday? My transatlantic connection was completely throttled. It's a wild guess, but it may have been the 140260 people torrenting the Season 2 premiere of Heroes combined with the 113347 breaking the law for Prison Break S3x02. And that's just counting the ones listed on eztv.

I remember (cue string quartet) when you'd get pistol whipped for including a 50 kb attachment and extradited for allowing HTML mail. And I'd be the one dishing out the punishments. Now I'm hoovering a couple of Gigabytes per day and nobody bats an eyelid, least of all myself.

Are torrents clogging up our pipes? They may be, but that's probably not the reason why CRIA (Canadian recording industry association) shut down the popular Demonoid tracker today.

I tried but couldn't find any links to support the theory. I do remember reading reports some years back about bittorrents killing bandwidth.

I recently switched from KPN to Vodafone to get a good deal on the Nokia N95. I'm terribly brand-loyal, but KPN aren't the most happening provider around and they couldn't offer me anything better than 370 euro. I picked up the phone for 129 € from the Vodafone shop yesterday and so far I am very happy with it and with Vodafone service. I haven't actually used the phone to speak to anyone yet, but then I'm probably an a-typical mobile user.

Rarely do I use my mobile phones to ring someone. I own one so people can phone me, which also rarely happens. So I mostly use my phone for texting (SMS), checking mail and for entertainment. By entertainment I mean reading/posting to websites and blogs, feeds, etc. I do some light moblogging too. I don't really play games at all, though if I could find a good Bejeweled clone for Symbian, I'd be tempted.

So yes, the Nokia n95. 'What computers have become', isn't that the advertising pitch? Well, I'm not selling off my desk- and laptops yet, but it certainly is an action-packed gadget.

What I like:
- The size. It's just right for me.
- Integrated Vox and Flickr. Connect using WiFi. Rocks!
- The radio auto-installs stations. Probably nothing new, but I like it.
- The ext speakers are good enough to listen to music to.
- The screen. Makes every crappy picture shine.
- The colour ('plum'). So stylish.
- The software, PC suite, is solid.
- Maps. Have yet to get the hang of it, but could be fun.

What I don't like:
- The camera. Thank you, I'll use a real one.
- Sometimes the screen is slow refreshing.
- The double slide feels a little rickety.
- The chrome nav keys are ugly. Why can't the front of the phone be as pretty as the back?
- Battery life. Using the phone for anything other than a phone will drain it like a hungry baby on a mother's tit.

Applications
Here are some lovely third party applications that I've installed on the phone:
- Opera Mini
- Gmail mobile (Superb client made by Google.)
- Best MessageStorer (Shareware app to backup SMS in a text or csv file. Isn't it bizarre they haven't got this built into PC Suite yet?)
- Putty (The well known telnet/ssh client.)
- VOX (Slick client, made by 6A)
- EQO Mobile (IM client, among other things - not sure about this one yet)
- Google Maps
- jTwitter (This looks better than TinyTwitter which I ran on my SonyEricsson.)
- Y-Browser (A fully enabled file browser, better than the native app)
- Yamigo (The server I'm using in the native IM app)

Wishlist
- It would be great if these phones had more storage capacity so you could use them to store the pictures you take with your real camera.

To protect the phone from scratching, I got a Crumpler P.P. 55 sleeve instead of Nokia's own expensive leather case.

Did I mention that I love this phone? I was able to do most of what I do with it with my previous phones (the ancient Nokia 3650 more so than the SE k750i - there seems to be more software for the Symbian OS.), but this is the first one where everything feels stable and reliable, even with the notoriously crappy Bluetooth connection on my PC.

I'm glad I can put the k750i to rest. I'm never switching phone brands again.

I wish there was a way on Flickr to upload a batch of photos temporarily, without them appearing in your photostream. So you can look at them, rotate them, whatever, and then tick off the ones you want to add to your stream, and the ones you want to delete. That's all.

Would love to have a go at VOX, now that I've learnt it allows for friends/family only blogging, as well as looking pretty. I've no idea what else it does, but there's stuff I want to write about all the time that the world has no business knowing and is meant only for a handful of people. Tired of having to be vague all the time.

This morning when I tried to go to gmail at mail.google.com/mail, I got a 404 not found page. When I shortened the URL and tried mail.google.com, I got this pixyblog.com homepage. Some kind of freaky DNS problem?

Where's mah mail, Sergey?

This problem only occurs in Firefox.