Once and Still a Techie Weblog

Beee an Eee User

Being a what user? What’s an Eee (pronounced like the letter ‘e’)?

The Eee is a cool device recently brought to market by ASUS a Taiwan-based company better known for their computer motherboards. It’s classified as a UMPC (Ultra-mobile PC) and looks like a real small laptop. Eee stands for “Easy to learn, easy to work, easy to play” the company’s slogan for the device.

I bought my Eee PC on the first week of December, just in time to avoid the local mad rush to buy this amazing techie’s dream machine. The Eee PC is literally flying off the store shelves. Last month ASUS exceeded market expectations and sold more than 350,000 units within one quarter. And you’ll be hard pressed to find it in stores all over Asia.

I used to lug around another Asus laptop the S5200N which has a 12-inch screen and I say it’s a world of difference. The Eee has a 7-inch screen and is so portable, it’s about the size and weight of a hard-cover novel.

It’s features include a WiFi adapter allowing you to go online wirelessly and start surfing instantly. It has Linux installed for an Operating System but don’t let that turn you off, the slogan says “Easy to use” remember? And it comes with about 40 applications pre-loaded including OpenOffice a free alternative to Microsoft Office and Firefox for a browser. Buy this baby and you can hit the ground running and be as productive as possible as soon as possible coz unlike most other laptops, usually those running MS Windows, it boots up ready for use in 20-30seconds ALL the time.

Another advantage of having Linux for the OS is you don’t have to be worried about the system getting infected by a virus or other malware, you can even go online without using any anti-malware software. Resource usage is pretty low so even just 512MB of RAM would be more than enough memory to let you do a whole bunch of stuff without slowing it down. Mind you this isn’t the best device for gaming. But I easily see students, writers, bloggers, salesmen and tech enthusiasts taking to it like moths to a flame.

The model I got for myself is a Black 4G 701 with 1GB RAM and a 4GB Solid-state drive. I’m pretty happy with its performance. In over a month’s use I have yet to find myself tapping the table waiting for an app to open. If you need more space to save files don’t worry it has 3 USB slots and an SD card reader. You can expand storage by getting an SD card, a flash drive or an external Hard drive.

Numerous web communities of Eee users have sprouted all over the Internet so if you’re a new owner of this awesome device you can get help from fellow Eee users on how to enhance its capabilities or how to resolve any problem that you might encounter. Examples of these websites are eeeph.com and eeeuser.com.
For more info on the Asus Eee check out this wiki.

Any plans on getting your own?