3. Less: 90 Minutes of Battery
One thing that hasn’t changed is the processor inside the Eee. It’s the same Intel Celeron 900MHz CPU on a 915GM motherboard. That’s where the Eee trumps the Via C7-M HP’s Mini-Note, which otherwise has a far better keyboard, screen quality and much more storage—but not a much higher price tag.
The extra memory gives the Eee 900 slightly better performance but despite scoring higher than usual for a PC this size on our benchmarks, performance in general doesn’t feel particularly responsive under Windows. There’s a natural limit to how powerful an application you’ll want to run on a small machine like this, because of the keyboard and screen size. We had no problem with the majority of applications, including streaming video in Windows Media Player, but we couldn’t get the VLC media player to play WMV or MOV video files, even locally, without freezing, pixelating or crashing.
The 900MHz Celeron processor inside the Eee 900 gives it a performance advantage over machines like the HP Mini-Note, which uses a low-power Via chip.
Another area where performance is disappointing is battery life. Increasing the screen size means a much bigger draw on the battery and ASUS’ own estimated battery life is half an hour less than for the Eee 701; just three hours. In use, setting Windows for maximum battery life, turning on Wi-Fi and setting screen brightness to full we got only 90 minutes of use for a mix of surfing, playing music, looking at photos and creating documents. We saw similar times for watching video files. Reduce the screen brightness and you can get this up to two hours, which is still very disappointing.
The power brick is small and easy to carry and the battery charges quickly, but that’s no comfort if you’re nowhere near a power outlet. In many countries Aus is shipping a smaller 4400mAh battery; the larger 5100 mAh battery would give another half hour of use, and it’s worth checking which battery you get before you buy. Even so, you need the double-height extended battery to get anything approaching a reasonable battery life.
The 4400mAh battery gives the Eee 900 as little as 90 minutes of battery life.
The larger screen lowers the battery life and puts up the price of the new Eee PC to around $550. That means it puts it into competition with cheap laptops that may be less portable, but give you a bigger screen, much larger storage and a longer battery life. The Eee 900 PC is still small and attractive but it’s not quite as portable and it’s not as obviously a bargain at the price.
The ASUS Eee 900 PC is still small and as easy to carry as a book; but the shorter battery life may mean you don’t want to carry it as much.
Do not get fooled by Asus! How can you imagine if there is only 4GB in C:
I think most people do not expect it is 4GB + 12GB for Windows XP Home version or 4GB + 16GB for Linux version (P.2 is wrong in this article)
Asus does not mentioned that in the USA website
http://usa.asus.com/products.aspx? [...] odelmenu=2
But mentioned in Taiwan website (Chinese, but anyone can read the SSD part)
http://tw.asus.com/products.aspx?l [...] odelmenu=2
One problem I have with the review is the Windows-centric approach to a machine that is built for Linux. My "favourite applications" all run on Linux but not necessarily on Windows.
Secondly, what's with the outdated fear-mongering about driver availability in Linux? Generally there are fewer driver problems with Linux than with Windows these days, for the simple reason that hardware manufacturers don't want to lose that share of their business.
With Windows you still get asked to provide driver disks and have to decide whether you want the latest Windows version or the manufacturers version. Not a problem with Linux.
Nor do you have to worry about a driver not being available for your version of Windows. With Linux the drivers are kept up to date and frequently back-ported to earlier versions of the kernel. Poor Windows users have to agonize over which version of Windows has the drivers for their hardware. And they to pay for their decisions.
alantlchan seems to have it right. There are two versions and both start with a 4G flash disk. I've also read another review that states you can get the smaller storage version with Linux for a reduced price. I haven't seen it advertised for sale anywhere however. Of course, it's still hard to find the new models advertised anywhere.