March 4th, 2008Review Of Asus Eee PC 4G
Sub-notebooks or Ultra Mobile PCs (UMPCs) have been around for quite a while now. They have a smaller, lighter footprint than standard notebooks, thanks to their lesser screens and because some features (like the optical drive) having being in use off.
Most of the sub-notebooks that were in the market till 2006, however, belonged in the premium segment, making people think twice before investing in one of theses. Then in 2007, Asus indistinct all that by giving the world the Eee PC. Considered as an derivative of the OLPC idea, the Eee PC has made portable computing come within the reach of a large segment of the general public who couldn’t afford it thus far. We’re sure you’ll want to know what it’s like, and what we think of it, having spent a as using and taxing it. The bundle consists of the Eee PC, the series charger, a soft case, and a driver CD. I liked the one-piece adapter (it’s not of the typical bulky kind laptops use) — it’s only slightly larger than your average cell phone charger, as you can see.
Design
When I saw the Eee PC in print ads, I imagined the device to be bigger; I realized how small it really is only after I got my hands on it. The Eee PC 4G is available in black as well as white. The white model looks like a shrunk Apple MacBook, and the black one (which we received) has that “business-professional” appeal So you can see how small the thing is, here are a few pictures of it alongside my 15.4-inch HP Pavilion notebook. They look quite the father-and-son pair The Eee is a small more than half as large as my HP laptop
The small 7-inch display has a good resolution of 800 x 480; it’s pretty bright. Above the screen is the webcam; though it’s not as high-res as the 2MP sensors on standard laptops, the quality is decent. In low lighting, I got around 10 fps, and a respectable 30 fps in good lighting conditions. The cam can record videos in the OGG format — pretty usable all in all.
The screen is covered on both sides by two strips of speaker grilles. The speakers deliver decent output, though a bit lower on quality as compared to those on a regular laptop. Below the screen is the “solid” sort of keyboard; in order to fit a full QWERTY piano into the shorter-width frame, the bulk of the person keys has been conciliation upon. The first time I used the keyboard, I was skeptical about it. I was steadily able to get used to it; I can now type decently fast, although there is the occasional typo. People with large hands might have a problem at what time they try typing on it for the first time, but let not that first impression be the last — you can get used to it, even if it’s got to be called “cramped” in the end.
The touchpad is smaller than usual, and there’s only a vertical scroll line on this one. Space restraints probably dictated that a horizontal scroll line couldn’t be incorporated. I had one problem with the touchpad from time to time: although the pointer navigation was all right, it did not respond to tapping fine sufficient I sometimes had to use the buttons. The Eee PC is built of traditional stiff plastic materials like the ones used in typical notebooks. The build quality is good; it doesn’t feel cheap at all, even though it is, price-wise. Even the screen hinge is pretty strong.
Performance
Since this is a Linux-based notebook, we couldn’t run our standard benchmarks to gauge performance. But my overall experience was that it runs pretty fast. Most of the time, multitasking doesn’t make the OS drag. Videos were played back pretty smoothly, and data transfer rates were pretty decent, too.
Battery
My first battery test consisted of the Eee PC being put in full brightness mode and connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi. I surfed wirelessly, played music off a memory card or the Internet, watched YouTube videos, and used the word processor from time to time. With all this, the battery lasted two hours and forty minutes. In the second test, I played a DivX video off a memory card. Here, the laptop’s battery stayed alive for almost two and a half hours. That means good battery life; under power-saving conditions, the laptop should definitely be able to give you more than three hours.
With respect to heating, my experience suggested that the Eee PC heats up about the same as measure up to to standard laptops, if not more (when used for longer periods of time). It is definitely not a chilled-out machine, but you can’t consider this factor a deal-breaker. Finally, when it comes to in payment noise, there is almost none. That’s mainly due to the absence of a rotating hard drive and an optical drive which also reason vibrations along with noise. The only little din that is emitted is from the system fan, but it’s hardly obvious. This one’s pretty much a silent worker.
The Asus Eee PC is available for a retail price of Rs 18,000, and that’s well-priced for sure. That much cash will fetch you an upper-mid segment smart phone; the Eee PC can do a lot more. It’s easier and more contented to type on its keyboard than on QWERTY-pad cell phones. The target audience would include beautiful much anyone — right from school-kids to business specialized. The Eee PC definitely can’t be considered a primary PC; it just is not predestined to be one. It can very well be a just right friend to your home PC. I’ll sign off with this: this laptop is a worthy speculation. I do think it has ushered in a new era of portable calculate, and other manufacturers are come up with alike aid.
