Asus eee PC - wow!

["Ian Lowe" <ianlowe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(disclosure - I work for RM, who are selling these in the UK)

I got my hands on a shiny new eee PC (we are selling it as the
mini-book into education) - and I am seriously impressed! it's a mini
laptop, in a roughly A5 form factor. It uses intel's new System on
chip version of the Celeron at 900mhz, has 512mb of ram and a 4Gb SSD
Hard drive (so no moving parts - it is *silent*)=20

The OS is Xandros, with an app launcher interface built by Asus.
There's roughly 1.9gb free when the OS is counted out. device has 3
USB 2.0 ports, an MMC/SD Card reader and a built in webcam.

Screen is a very clear easy to read 7.5 inch, resolution is 800x480,
so not huge, but very, very useable. It has the grunt to play xvid
encoded movies without any hassles.

it can take XP (with some tweaking to avoid a swap file killing the
flash hard drive) but to be honest, the linux distro onboard does
pretty much everything you want/need in this size.

I'm getting one for myself, and they will basically be selling at =A3200
vat inc.

I'll post some pictures and so on when I get my own one (this one is a
test machine for the dept), but first impression is that this is a
pretty damn tasty little device :)

I.