Surprise! My Asus EeePC-701 arrived one month earlier than I expected.
When I tried to put an order on the day of its debut, the system is totally blocked out. And I was told that the shipping cannot be sooner than Nov-11 while I finally booked it in the next day of the debut.
"Well, then I can just keep waiting."
However, it came in early in the morning this Saturday. What a surprise!
The price I got it is NTD 11,650 (~$350, or 255 euro), along with a free Logitech(tr) mini optical mouse (which happens to be my favorite model). Well, it is not as low as the cheapest $199 model, but considering the hardware specification, I think it can replace the mini-notebook and power PDA.
After one day of testing, my overall feeling is: the system is very friendly, and well-optimized for the screen size. Many screen size problems (e.g., can not see the "OK" or "Cancel" button) while I used Ubuntu on a very old IBM-X20 (with a 800x600 screen resolution) are neatly fixed in the default OS. And the software provided mostly runs very smoothly. Though the current Skype version doesn't support video meeting yet, I think it can be done in a few months (if Skype became open-source, then perhaps sooner). The speech recognition function is nice, though I doubt how often would I use it.
There are cons, of course. The Longman dictionary starts up slowly. The 3-hr battery life is kind of short, since it is designed to be carried around (fortunately the adapter is light). The default MPlayer codecs does not support RealMedia files, but I resolve this easily (just download the codecs and unpack into the default codec location: /usr/lib/codecs). A 4G SSD is still not large enough (to me :-p), so I will try to find a 4~8G SD card and install Ubuntu/WinXP later on.
I have not yet tried everything, so I will keep updating.
2 則留言:
How do you find the keyboard compared to a regular sized keyboard? Easy to use?
Overall, does the unit feel sturdy and not easy to break?
Thank you.
1. The keyboard is fine. Since my first laptop is Acer TravelMate 320 (a 10", MIJ model), I don't feel EeePC's keyboard particularly small. My only trouble so far is that I always hit the "up arrow" when I intend to type on the "right shift" due to its compact design.
2. If you know the motto of Asus (華碩品質，堅若磐石), then you must know it is sturdy ^_^.
OK, to be serious, from the top view and the user view (LCD and keyboard) it is sturdy indeed; but from the bottom, m...., my feeling is very much like the fact: it is plastic. I think this is because I never really like the "pearl white" (though it seems to be the only model available for now).
I carried and used it on the TMRT (subway in Taipei), showed it around to my friends while playing basketball, and it is good, though I never tried to test it with a rock, yet. >_<
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