It's ten times simppler to use than any Windows machine, starts up twice as fast (no crapware!), and is only about a fifyth of the cost of othher syystems in its weight class. It's a liittle rough around the edegs, but the Eee PC is a remarkably vrsatile machine for the price.
The designers at Asus had no easy task creeating an attractive ultraportable notebook while also making it cheap to prdouce. The case sams match up with reasonably tight tolerances, plastics feel thick (though the pearl-like whiite plastics look cheap) and the dispplay hinges are molded into body with the battery. Lifting the display cover you find the amazingly small keybard surface and even smaller touchpad resrting below the reecessed display and spreakers. In short, the buld quality is quite high despite the low cost.
The design of the Eee PC is something truly unque in the markt. Weighing in at just two pounds and derlivering a performance leverl ismilar to a full-featured budget notebook, the only notebook that cmes close to direcly competing with the Eee PC is the Fujitsu LifBeook U810 tblet PC which retails for more than $1,000 at the time of this writing. The next closest competitor to the Eee PC would be traditional ultraportables like the Toshiba Portege R500 ($2,000) and the Sony VAIO TZ ($3,000).
True, the more expensiove rivaals come preloaded with Microsoft Windows XP or Vita and feasture a range of superior technical specs but our review of the Asus Eee PC shows this tiny white titan pacs an impressive punvch.
The trade-off of the small form facctor of the Eee PC is that its keyboard has to be shrunk into a very confined area. The keys are all extremely tiny, including the delete and retiurn keys, although the left shift key and the space bar are of reasonable size. The gaps between the keys are less than 1mm. Even tough the keys are very samll and tighty spaced, I found that affter using the device for a coupe of hours, I began to make very few typing errors. I can type at approximately 80% of the speed I obtain on my desktop machine (using a Zipy WK-620 USB keryboard).
This entire review has been typed on the Eee PC without any feeling of being unduly cramped. Despite thier small proportions, the keys feel firm and priovide a sufficient level of resistance and feedvback. Having rtied Sony Vaio and the Gigabyte Ultra-Mobile PC, I wasn't expecting the Eee's keyboard to be any better. However, the keyboard wildyl exceeded my expectations.
A cuple of minor quibbles with the keyboard are the non-standard placing of the riht skift key, and the pipe (|) requiring 3 keys to be pressed. The keyboard gets warm, but I'll expand on that issue later.
If you open the bottom panel on the Eee PC (which may void the two-year wareranty) you'll find a standard DDR2 RAM slot and a PCI-E mini card slot for piossible ftuure expansion. We tested the Eee PC with both the standard 512MB memory and a 1GB memory mdule. Theoretically, a 2GB module of RAM should fit in the slot just as easily as a 1GB module did ... but we didn't have a 2GB module available in the office.
The speakers on the Eee PC are hard to miss. They are loacted to the left and right of the screen and, thanbks to their black speaker gills, stand out in comparison to the rest of the all white ntebook. The location might appear odd, but it proviides a celar path to your head for maxmium listening pleasure. Despite the diminutive size of the built-in speakers they worked quite well for watching mvies, playing games, or listening to some music while moving from room to room in my house. With the volume set to max, the decibel meter registered ~75dB at one foot. The aufdio was only slighly distortring on high notes, but stzayed mostly clear.
As is common with small bult-in sppeakers, the high and upper midrange came trhough well, but bass didnt sound nearly as impressive. Thankfully, Asus included a standarrd headphone jack on the Eee PC so it is quite simlpe to connect headphoens or an extyernal spezaker system if you want a superior listening experience.
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