Asus Eee PC – Eeempressive!

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Asus Eee PC – Eeempressive!
By John P Campbell

Do the words ultra-light, ultra-compact, ultra-thin when used for laptops send your wallet scurrying for cover? Sweat no more, Asus came up with the perfect solution for you. Its small, its light and it just works. It’s called the Eee PC!

When Asus announced the Eee PC in 2007, people were highly skeptical of its performance and quality considering the low price tag. “Easy to learn, Easy to work, Easy to play” but didn’t seem to be easy to pull off. The first Eee PC 4G was released on October 16, 2007. Needless to say it was a major success and sold 300,000 units by the end of the year.

So what was it that made this laptop, if we can call it that, such a huge success? Let’s take a closer look. It sports a 7 inch WXGA (800 x 480) screen flanked by stereo speakers on either side and a VGA webcam on the top. Its actual dimensions are 225 × 165 × 21-35 mm and it weighs a shade over 2 lbs. Add to it the usual gamut of onboard audio ports, standard VGA out connector, Ethernet Jack, 3 USB 2.0 ports, one MMC/SD Card holder, built in Wi-Fi and a Kensington Lock slot, one PCI-e mini slot and that’s pretty much everything crammed in to the package. There is a microphone too that sits, surprisingly, on the underside.

On the inside it is powered by a 900 Mhz Celeron UMV Processor, already under clocked to 630 Mhz by Asus, whose focus is more on lowering power consumption than number crunching to try and get as much battery life out of its 4 cell Li-Ion battery. Depending up on the usage it can last anywhere from 2 to 3.5 hours. A 910 chipset based motherboard keeps things tidy with all the onboard devices. Memory ranges from 512 MB to 1 GB depending upon the model, which is more than enough to run Xandros, the linux distro shipped with it or Windows XP which will soon be available as an option. But here comes the best part, its shipped with SSD instead of HDD. The result: Lower power consumption, faster performance, and more durability and so on. On the flip side it means they are able to ship it with only 2 GB, 4 GB and 8GB models. And thanks to the preinstalled programs the actual user usable storage space is limited to 400 MB, 1.6 GB and 5.1 GB respectively. Well to wipe that look of disappointment off your face, the SD slot supports SDHC so you can chuck in a 32 GB card in there to take care of your storage needs.

It comes with 40 preinstalled applications including Flash games, Firefox, Open Office, SMPlayer and Skype to take care of most of your productivity and entertainment needs. Ok, so you cannot play Crysis on it, but you can do the basic things like create and use documents, surf the net, chat, play movies and music and so on. It’s not a desktop replacement, it’s for those who need a laptop but cannot afford one or do not want to lug around a 5-6 pound notebook. It’s meant for young kids, senior citizens, students. It’s meant for writers like me who would love to be able to travel around with my office restricted to a notepad sized device that weighs less than the Physics book in my college! Asus plans to sell few millions of these this year and with the next generation 9 inch model just announced I don’t see anyone stopping them from doing it.

This article is written by Jason Campbell who runs eDealsDepot – one of the most successful coupon websites on the internet for handpicked deals.

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