ASUS eeePC, the company's new $499 ultraportable machine, may well be of interest to business thanks to its low price and solid feature set.
The eeePC is touted by ASUS as a product for the education market, and with its 7 inch screen and commensurately small keyboard it certainly has childlike proportions. Yet the computer also has plenty to attract business, with the OpenOffice suite pre-installed alongside, Firefox, the Thunderbird email client and a PDF reader, all of which run on the computer's Linux operating system.
The presence of Skype, a web camera, microphone, speakers and both WiFi and wired Ethernet facilities make the computer a passable phone or conferencing tool (although sound quality is passable at best).
In our very early, very informal tests, we found battery life was comfortably exceeding three hours, which we can imagine lasting a full day for intermittent use given that the computer takes less than half a minute to start up and a few seconds to shut down. The eeePC is also very easy to use, thanks to a GUI that has borrowed heavily from Windows XP and has far fewer rough edges that other Linux GUIs we have experienced over the years.
The computer is, however, far from perfect. The desktop offers a tabbed interface that groups applications according to their likely use for work, play, education or communication, an intuitive arrangement made complex by a small and unresponsive touchpad that is hard to use alongside the disconcertingly thin single mouse button.
We also found some hiccups when connecting to our WLAN, a task that the computer spent more than five minutes accomplishing for no discernible reason. There were also occasional stutters as we switched between applications or when the computer took a few seconds to respond to a mouse click. When we inserted USB memory the computer did not recognise it for several seconds, during which time there was no indication the computer had begun .
Overall, however, the package clearly has potential. With its supposedly bump-proof solid state disk and a screen we found pleasingly readable in many light conditions, the device is a new alternative to smartphones and handhelds for mobile workers, a role that seems sensible as its small size makes it a poor tool for information workers who spend hours at a time in front of a computer.
The eeePC also undercuts both of these classes of device on price and sets a new low for the ultraportable PC category. Windows-powered ultraportable PCs are yet to fall through the $1000 barrier or appear in significant numbers, yet do have the advantage of the vast range of software written for the platform.
The eeePC has the potential to run far richer client applications than its handheld rivals, but corporate users will need to invest in a Linux-based client to take advantage of that feature.
Overall, it seems sensible to familiarise yourself with this computer, which at $499 (less than the retail price of many Windows versions) makes a largely pain-free experiment.