The Asus Eee PC, and why small could be big

– A cheesy picture of my cat, with Asus Eeepc, for scale.

“If,” said the worried Sony executive, “the Asus starts to do well, we are all in trouble. That’s just a race to the bottom.”

Ah. Don’t you just love the sound of.. er… paradigms being shifted in the morning? [Note to subs: find something more poetic for this line. Subs. Subs? Where d'yall... ah].

The executive in question was talking to CNet recently about the lovely Asus Eee PC - a tiny laptop with a 7-inch display, Wifi and no drives (hard or optical). The price tag matches its dimensions; the machines start at just £200.

You can understand his concern; the weee machine is very bad news indeed if you’re trying to sell slightly bigger laptops for roughly ten times that pricetag.

I got an Asus last month, a generous birthday prezzie from Mrs Tosh. And, four weeks or so in, I love my little laptop. I wouldn’t swap for a Sony. Even the gorgeous MacBook Air, by dint of its exorbitant pricetag, is no match.

It’s small enough to fit in the little satchel I carry around, and light enough for me not to care it’s there. With no moving parts, it’s robust enough to cope with being constantly on the move. And all that makes it very handy - whenever I need a computer to work on, it’s there. It’s dinky enough even to be usable when I’m jammed in the back of a Virgin 747 which, at the moment, looks like a Good Thing indeed.

So, all told, a lovely wee machine - a great choice if you’re in the market for something small and useful. I heartily recommend it.

And, using it, you do wonder: is it significant in an industry-wise sense? Is the little Asus the first of a new class of computer?

As Glyn Moody pointed out in the Guardian the other week, the machine is running the Linux operating system, and its huge success makes it a significant breakthrough for that OS. Finally, goes the theory, a machine that proves you don’t need a Phd to use Linux.

I’m delighted it’s a Linux machine, and I might explore the system’s innards sometime, but the interesting thing for me so far has simply been that the operating system isn’t an issue, either way. It could be running an OS by Tonka, for all I care.

Certainly, it lacks the pleasing eye-candy of OSX, or the transition-y joy of Keynote - my presentation app of choice these days. It’s not part of my carefully synched, interconnected cluster of Macs and iPhone, where documents, bookmarks and contacts flit from desktop to palmtop to (big) laptop with no supervision from me. The interface isn’t what you’d ever term beautiful.

But none of that really matters. What’s most important is that it’s got Firefox for web browsing, and that Firefox has Flash, and all the other bits and pieces you expect from a proper web browser; thus, the web works properly. And, thus, Google applications, which gives me email and documents, runs just fine.

Elsewhere, pre-loaded, there’s Skype to use with the little camera and microphone built in to the lid, and OpenOffice for when I can’t get an internet connection to Google apps. A video out jack lets me do presentations - it happily steps up its resolution to fill a projector’s display. And I can upload to Flickr, picture transfer made particuarly easy by the little flash card reader built in the side.

That, really, is all I need. The differences between this and my next laptop of lust - the Air - aren’t really worth £1000 to me.

So the OS wars angle passes me by. It’s not as if the Asus, lovely as it is, will have me forgoe my desktop Mac, where iTunes and iPhoto (and soon, I suspect, Aperture) are the most-used apps.

But, away from all the advantages Apple’s vertical integration gives it, things are different, I suspect. Specifically, if I was a Windows laptop manufacturer, I’d be more worried. Just as Windows is getting absurdly greedy for computing resources, here’s a little laptop that cuts things right down.

The executive I quoted at the top makes this shift in the laptop business sound like a bad thing. He makes it sound as if the Eee PC isn’t, yet, doing well - that this might be a genie that can somehow be kept in the bottle. I can understand his denial; working in an industry also challenged by upstart, low-cost competition, I recognise the emotions he’s facing.

Truth is, I suspect he and I are swimming in the same choppy water. The waves have been kicked up by the opening up of once-expensive, complex tools to whole new markets - a line of innovation that’s already brought desktop (print) publishing, easy digital publishing (blogging) and cheap digital audio and video to mass markets.

It’s about time the same forces started shaping the devices which faciliate all that creativity - especially laptops, where price points haven’t changed much in years.

For those of us with laptop habits, all this is great news. The bad news for our Sony executive is the race to the bottom may already have started - it’s already time to adapt, too late to forewarn.

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COMMENTS / 7 COMMENTS

I’m sorely tempted to pick one up to replace my thumped 12″ powerbook but how do you find the keyboard for extended typing?

(a part of me wants to just get the bluetooth keyboard for the nokia N-95 but another part of me wants of these)

Craig McGill added these pithy words on Mar 18 08 at 12:07 pm

The keyboard is undoubtedly small (the return key particularly so) but I got used to it quickly. I find the trackpad extremely sensitive, even after tinkering with it. For £200 though, it’s amazing value.

Gareth added these pithy words on Mar 18 08 at 2:17 pm

My Asus is just fine with me. The keyboard isn’t really an issue, no more so than switching from a PC to a Mac keyboard.

The problem you might have is tracking an Asus down right now. 4Gig stock is pretty much exhausted, albeit for a few unscrupulous eBayers. It may be worth waiting for the 8Gig, expected sometime next month.

This tracker is pretty cool.

onionbagblogger added these pithy words on Mar 18 08 at 8:20 pm

Of course, in all the geek excitement, I forgot to pull you up for the admission of having a manbag!

Craig McGill added these pithy words on Mar 18 08 at 9:22 pm

Craig - I am secure in my metrosexuality, of which my manbag is a key expression

The keyboard is fine; it *is* very small, but fine for bashing out notes, or blog posts. I wouldn’t pick it to write my next book… as much as anything, the screen’s pretty tiny too. But it is possible to touch type, and browse reasonably well.

I’ve got the Asus as a second laptop - think it works well in that role, or perhaps as a second computer - you’ll want something full size somewhere, but sometimes it’s more important to have a laptop that is really easily portable.

I hear rumours that a new model with bigger screen and maybe more memory is due out v soon, which is likely the one onionbagblogger mentions above, so it might be worth holding out.

My only concern is that Asus haven’t been very good at meeting demand, ala Apple of a few years ago - these little laptops would be far bigger had they made more.

Neil Mc added these pithy words on Mar 19 08 at 7:51 am

What’s very interesting to me is that Linux-powered sub-£100 laptops are the big thing for schools at the moment (see last week’s Guardian Education supplement), so we will be seeing a generation of people who have grown up with this sort of thing rather than the Windows generation.

Paul Bradshaw added these pithy words on Mar 20 08 at 12:01 pm