Asus Eee PC Review - pcmag.com

by Cisco Cheng

You've probably heard of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) initiative, which is intended to provide cheap laptops (called XOs) to underprivileged children around the world. What you might have missed is that ASUS , a company known for making laptops and laptop parts, recently launched its own answer to the XO laptop, the Eee PC , a 2-pound ultraportable that's well worth its $400 price, even though it has only 4GB of storage and a Linux operating system.

The three E's in Eee PC stand for easy to learn, play, and work; excellent mobile experience; and excellent Internet experience. The ASUS Eee PC, however, is not solely for children—it's meant for anyone who hasn't been able to afford a first laptop. The version that I reviewed (the Eee PC 4G) sells for $400 (street), with other configurations available for as low as $300 (the Eee PC 2G Surf) by the end of November. To achieve this price point, ASUS had to forgo a Windows operating system in favor of Linux (although ASUS has announced that it will be offering Microsoft Windows on the laptop by the end of the year), load relatively slow processing parts, and bundle only 4GB of internal storage space. Despite all that, this ultraportable can do just as much as a Windows laptop. ASUS makes sure of this by providing ample software and a substantial feature set that's well worth the money. And unlike the XO, the Eee PC is actually available for purchase now.

It's refreshing to see that the Eee PC is as sleek as it is light. Laptops in this price range tend to be bulky, unattractive, and not worth my time. (I still can't believe I went through the trouble of reviewing the GQ MX-3203.) This 2-pound ultraportable does a good job of mimicking some of its (up to five times) more-expensive siblings, like the ASUS S6F. With the Eee PC, you can choose from an array of colors, including blue, green, black, pink, or the white in which my test configuration came.

The Eee PC resembles an oversize UMPC, or a larger version of the Fujitsu LifeBook U810, albeit currently without Windows and tablet capabilities. But you can't find a UMPC that costs $400. By contrast, though, the same price gets you two of OLPC's XO laptop—one goes to you, the other to a needy child.

When you first flip the Eee PC 4G's lid open, you may be surprised at how small the screen is. The laptop looks as if it could fit an 11-inch widescreen, similar to the Sony VAIO VGN-TZ150N. ASUS opted to put a pair of speakers around the 7-inch screen instead. The 800-by-480 resolution isn't great, and it doesn't have the glossy coating found in many media laptops. Still, it's big and bright enough to handle any multimedia task thrown at it. Its form factor allows for a keyboard just 83 percent the size of a standard keyboard. It's cramped, but if you spend enough time on it, it gets easier to use with practice. I was able to type most of this review on the ultraportable in a reasonable amount of time. The only thing I found annoying was the difficulty of pressing mouse buttons.

The Eee PC 4G's features are, for the most part, similar to those of other laptops. Its three USB ports are quite generous for a 2-pound system. It doesn't have a FireWire port because this is not a video-editing laptop, and the lack of an optical drive is justified because of its size. (It would have been amazing if ASUS managed to include one.) A 100-megabit-per-second Ethernet port, a modem, and built-in Wi-Fi (802.11g) take care of all your network connections. A VGA port is also available for external monitor hookups. Even more impressive are the addition of SecureDigital and Memory Stick card readers on the right-hand side of the system and a webcam above the screen. The hard drive is not a typical rotational hard drive but a 4GB solid-state drive (SSD). It's essentially an internal flash drive acting as a primary storage medium. ASUS did this mostly to minimize costs.

For the Eee PC, ASUS developed its own full-blown operating system based on Xandros Linux. The user interface is easy to understand and navigate. It's similar to a Web page with multiple tabs. In this case, there are four main tabs representing Internet, Work, Learn, and Play. Each of these tabs contains a mix of icons that represent an application, setting, or Web site link.

The Internet tab has some interesting icons, including Skype, an e-book reader, a wireless utility, and site links to Wikipedia, Google Docs, and Internet Radio. The Skype application works just as it does in Windows, and the webcam lets you video-chat. You can connect to the Internet via 802.11g Wi-Fi; doing so generates a list of available hot spots within range. The Eee PC connected to my Netgear WNR834B router, with WPA enabled, right away, although a D-Link DIR-635 router and my home router (Linksys WRT54G) required some tinkering (and patience) before they were able to connect. The Eee PC's Web browser is Mozilla's Firefox 2.0.0.7. I had no problems playing back videos from YouTube, running remote access through a site called LogMeIn, accessing my Microsoft Outlook webmail, and uploading photos to a photo-sharing site (Flickr).

The Work tab has everything you need to run mainstream office applications. ASUS loads OpenOffice 2.0, a Linux suite that can read and write most of the file formats found in Microsoft Office as well as other applications. Most of my MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files took a while to load and weren't as fluid as when run in Office, but they eventually opened fine in OpenOffice. The only exception was that this version of OpenOffice doesn't recognize the .docx format (the open XML format used in MS Office 2007). The Eee PC has a built-in Acrobat reader for PDF files. It also includes Mozilla's Thunderbird Web client, which doesn't even come close to MS Outlook but does a decent job collecting e-mail from popular sites like Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail.

Xandros Linux supports a slew of printer models. I connected both my HP Photosmart 7550 and an Epson Stylus C62 photo printer with no hassles. The File Manager icon is almost like Windows Explorer's. The system recognized both my simultaneously connected USB flash drives and various document folders. If you hook the Eee PC into a Windows network, the File Manager's Windows-like directory structure also displays your network. You can see other computers in your network and share files between them, as long as you have all the necessary sharing functions enabled in your other computers.

The Learn tab is populated with science and math applications for up to a high-school level, nothing worth talking about in depth. The apps get interesting with the Play tab, where you find a bunch of icons that play back your multimedia files. For example, plugging in an SD card from my digital camera automatically brought a selection menu that let me choose between Photo Manager, File Manager, or Music Manager. The photos on my SD card populated as thumbnails swiftly into the Photo Manager. Editing photos, however, is limited to a severely crippled Paint application. You can attempt to install a program like GIMP to get Photoshop-like functionality. Bear in mind, though, that you have 4GB of storage to work with, 2.5GB of which is used by the operating system. Audio files are managed through the Music Manager, which recognizes various file formats, including MP3, AAC, and WAV. The Music Manager's Media play does a good job of playing back WMV, H.264, and MPEG video files. However, playing back a DVD movie through an external USB optical drive produced all sort of artifacts and distortions. Even streaming an audio CD through an external optical drive produced an annoying delay. The machine simply isn't powerful enough to run these tasks.

You don't need fast parts to run components other than an external optical drive—it's Linux, after all. That's why an Intel Celeron M processor and 512MB of RAM are more than sufficient. Still, you can upgrade to 1GB of RAM on your own by screwing open the bottom panel in the laptop base and popping in a 1GB stick in place of the 512MB one. Interestingly, next to the memory slot is a mini-PCI Express slot that will let you upgrade your internal flash storage. ASUS will start selling storage upgrades later on this year. For now, however, you'll void the warranty if you attempt any of these upgrades.

The system booted up in just 21 seconds, much quicker than a similar Windows machine would take. It goes without saying, though, that any form of gaming should be Web-based, as most of the 3D-intensive ones will not be supported by this operating system. I couldn't perform any of my performance tests because they don't run on Linux. ASUS is claiming that the Eee PC will get you in the range of 3 to 4 hours of battery life, which sounds about right based on my experience in playing with the machine until the battery was drained.

The ASUS Eee PC 4G is a tremendous bargain for people with general-purpose computing needs who don't plan on running any sophisticated software. It's intuitive enough that even a little child can learn to use it, and it loads everything you need for performing basic office and multimedia tasks. Best of all, as of November 1, you can get a beautiful-looking 2-pound ultraportable for $400 at J&R Music World and through a wealth of online e-tailers. There are some oddities, like the 4GB storage capacity and DVD decoding issues, but you can count on improvements to both the hardware and software load as time goes by. For now, this is still a great bargain.