Review and video - How often have you bought the latest gadget, only the throw it away or stash it in a dark closet after just a couple days of use? It’s an expensive habit, something which I do too often, but once in a while something really special comes along and the Asus Eee PC is it.

Officially called the Asus 701 Eee PC, this flash-based subnotebook is tiny and is smaller than your average mousepad and weighs less than two pounds. It boots up and shutdowns very fast and is pre-loaded with almost all the applications I need, after if there’s something missing I can simply load it onto a SD or SDHC card and slip it into the computer.

Last week I bought the Eee PC in Bangkok Thailand for a mere $370 (darn dropping US Dollar) and I’ve been using the computer constantly since then. Why didn’t anyone come up with this a few years ago - I would have saved tons of money buying phones, PDAs and laptops.

Asus Eee PC chassis pics ...

Asus Eee PC screenshots ...

Chassis and ports

The body of the Eee PC is made almost completely of plastic and has a solid feel to it - that is no creaking sounds or bending when you type on the keyboard. Since there are no hard drives or CD-ROM players, the computer is also very thin and weighs less than two pounds. Currently the Eee is available in variety of colors including black, white and green. The 4G model that we purchased does not have an integrated webcam and comes with 512 MB of RAM and 4 GB of flash.

There are three USB ports - one on the left and two on the right sides. The left side also has a 10/100 Ethernet port, microphone in (pink) and headset/speaker output (green).

A laptop locking port, VGA output, and SD/SDHC card slot round out the right side. The Eee PC instantly recognized my 2 GB Kingston SD card and unlike many other laptops, the SD/SDHC cards mount flush with the chassis so you won’t have any annoying edges catching on your clothing or carrying case.

Screen and speakers

The seven-inch screen has an 800 by 480 pixel native resolution and doesn’t have one of those annoying glossy anti-glare coatings - something that really isn’t needed since you’re not going to watch any high quality videos on this machine.

The screen is bright enough to be read outside on a cloudy day and pressing the function and F3/F4 keys will lower or raise the brightness. As you can expect from such a low resolution, text and pictures aren’t going to be as sharp as a monster 1680 X 1050 pixel screen on a 15-inch laptop.

Along both the left and right sides of the screen are the speakers which are surprisingly strong for their size. You should have no problem listening to music on the speakers in a quiet room, but you don’t have to take our word because you can judge for yourself in the following video of us playing the Halo theme. Of course, you can always plug in headphones if the speakers aren’t loud enough.

flvremotehttp://www4.tomshardware.com/site/downloads/asuseee_speakers.flv/flvremote

Asus Eee speaker test

Keyboard layout

The Eee PC has a standard laptop keyboard with the obvious caveat that the keys are much smaller. If you have small asian fingers, like I do, then it’s not that hard to semi-touch type, but bets are off for anyone else. In fact, I typed out this whole review on the Eee PC under the pre-installed OpenOffice Writer application.

Along the top of the keyboard are the F1 to F12 keys which when pressed along with the function key in the bottom left corner modifies common laptop settings like Wi-Fi access, screen brightness, and volume.

The right shift key is a bit small (half the size of the left one) because it is tucked in between the arrow and Enter keys. If you are a fast typist, you will often hit one of the arrow keys or accidentally hit enter, instead of the right-shift key, and jump to another sentence.

The arrow keys double up as Home, Page Up/Page Down and End when pressed along with the function key.

Operating system and installed applications

The Eee PC runs a modified version of the Xandros Linux operating system and several useful open source programs are pre-installed. All the programs are organized into tabs labeled: Internet, Work, Learn, Play, Settings and Favorites. If you are concerned about access to the OS source code, Asus has released a statement saying that it will respect GPL guidelines and will make the code available. Read about that here .

The Internet tab is probably where most people will spend their time because it has the web browser, Skype and shortcuts to the popular web-based mail sites along with Gmail and Google docs. This tab is also where you can set up your wired and wireless access connections.

For workaholics on the go, there is the Open Office 2.0 Suite installed and it functions almost like Microsoft Windows. The suite includes a word processor, spreadsheet app, a Power Point clone and a note taking program. There’s also a PDF reader and mail program thrown in.

Playback of media like mp3s, pictures and WMV video files is done through the various applications in the "Play" tab. We had no problems listening to any mp3 files, but high-quality video playback is quite jerky. Any fast moving video will also not synchronize correctly with sound. The video player does have a setting that for video/audio synch, but this doesn’t help much.

flvremotehttp://www4.tomshardware.com/site/downloads/asuseee_wmv_playback.flv/flvremote

Asus Eee PC WMV playback

You can also record sound through either an attached microphone or with the integrated mic port. Since the integrated port is located under the keyboard, any recordings will sound muffled.

Boot and shutdown time

With the default Xandros installation, the computer takes 25 seconds to boot and you can shave a few seconds off by enabled the fast BIOS POST in the motherboard options. Shutdown takes around five seconds.

When the computer’s desktop screen appears, it is ready for use. This is unlike Windows XP or Vista where you have an unbearable 30 seconds and in some cases minutes of disk thrashing before your computer is truly useful.

The shutdown and standby times make the computer very convenient to use. How often have you tried shutting down a Windows laptop only to have the drive churn away? Since the Eee is flash based, you can immediately start packing without having to worry about busting a read/write drive head.

flvremotehttp://www4.tomshardware.com/site/downloads/asuseee_boot.flv/flvremote

Asus Eee boot time demonstration

Battery life

We didn’t do any formal battery life testing on the Eee PC, but it appears to last approximate between two and a half to three hours (on full-screen brightness) after one week of ownership. The computer will automatically enter standby mode when you close the lid, but interestingly enough we discovered that standby mode will drain a significant portion of the battery if left for a few hours. Since the startup and shutdown times of the Eee are so quick, it usually doesn’t make sense to even try standby mode.

The battery gauge is located in the bottom-right corner of the screen and only displays power in 10% increments.

Common mods

A huge modding community has grown around the Eee PC and many do-it-yourself upgrades are well documented on the Internet. The most popular forums appears to be the ones at forum.eeeuser.com.

The simplest thing you can do to soup up your Eee is to swap out the SODIMM RAM chip for a higher capacity version. Unfortunately, the default Xandros installation will only recognize 1 GB of memory, but an upgraded kernel is available that will recognize 2 gigs of RAM. A new kernel will also allow you to "overclock" the Intel processor by 30%. We put that in quotes because the processor inside the Eee is actually underclocked by 30% (70 MHz front side bus instead of the default 100 MHz) and you would just be bringing it back to the original factory speed.

In addition to upgrading the kernel, many people have gone a step further by installing a new operating system like Ubuntu Linux and even a stripped down version of Windows XP. The XP install requires a bit more work because you’re taking an operating system designed for spacious hard drives and then fitting it into a small flash disk or SD card. Many of the modders are using the open source program Nlite to do this dirty work, but many stores in Asia will install Windows XP for you. In fact the store we bought our computer from offered to install it for free.

Windows XP will recognize a 2 GB memory module by default.

Conclusion

Ok, so you’re not going to be doing any heavy duty video editing and computation work on the Eee, but this computer isn’t designed for it. It’s meant to be a walk-around, general purpose machine and it works quite well for most tasks. The Asus Eee PC has become my preferred walk-around laptop for daily use because of its simple design and quick booting and shutdown. If you already own a laptop, then you know the pain of waiting for the darn thing to turn on and thrash through the hard drive.

Perhaps even more aggravating is shutting down a regular laptop and possibly waiting a minute or two for everything to wind down. The Asus Eee PC doesn’t have any of those problems and you can just close the lid (or click shutdown for a full shutdown), throw the pc in your backpack and start walking away. You’ll be out the door and in your car while your friend’s laptop is still churning away.

From a happy owner of an Asus Eee PC... Humphrey Cheung.