My little Eee

Now that I've had the EEE for almost two weeks it s time to do a quick, subjective review...

Short version:

A little slower than on my desktop, a little faster than the old Craptop - the main problem is actually to get used to the american keyboard... oh well :)

Long version:

Off course, there are about a thousand reviews of the Eee out there, most of the a lot better than mine is going to be. However, these are my exeriences and opinions, so there you go. The Eee itself is a nice little machine - the build quality of it is suprisingly good despite the low price. My left screen hinge made a creaking noise the first few times, but whatever caused that has gone away, leaving me with hinges that opens smoothly, yet are firm enought to keep the screen where I put it. The screen itself was / is a pleasant surprice. Despite the relatively low resolution, it's crisp and clear, making webpages and documents much more viewable than anticipated when I bought the Eee. The keyboard has taken virtually no time tofet used too - allthought fair is far: the Psio had a much smaller keyboard and I wrote a whole novella on that... The only minor niggle is that i don't have easy access to Norwegian letters without having to go through the characther map. I've heard that there exists a 'US International' keyboard layout that should be able to give me access to pretty much every special letter there exists out there, but... I havn't gotten around to that yet.

On the software and OS side of things I can't add much - it works pretty much as advertised out of the box, and with the help of tweaks (or is that tweeeaks?) and hints from the community at eeeuser.com, I've gotten it to look and behave in a way I can live with. The only software I've added so far - in addition to the utilities for tweaking - is VLC, mostly because I'm familiar with it and not because of any shortfalls in the player that come with the Eee. As I type this I'm sitting in the 'chow hall' at the local airbase, doing my stint as Officer Of the Day. Despite the fact that there is no WiFi here, i'm able to work quite well with Google Docs offline. OpenOffice would work just as well - I'll probably switch to using that more later - but Google Docs have the benefit of being on all my computers, by sheer virtue of being web based.

I havn't played too much mediafiles yet, but what I have thrown at my Eee it has played with no trouble. It recognises all the various USB-sticks, MP-players and external DVD-players I've hooked up so far.

The obligiatory pictures comparing my nice, shiny white Eee with my old Psion5 and my old laptop:

Overall, I'l give the Eee six out of five stars - it works better than I expected, it is smaller than I realised (honestly, untill you have held one in your haand you can't really grasp how tiny it is), and it simply works. And as a bonus, I'm learning about Linux as well. Can life be better?