Asus Eee 900 out soon :D

Read More......

Yay!

For those of you that don't know, I have an Asus Eee, which is amazing and that I love very much. It is the size of an A5 notepad (or half A4 size), with a 7" monitor, 512mb RAM, 4gb harddrive, and has no CD drive (just 3 USB and 1 memory card port). It also has a VGA webcam and microphone. Not great specs, but it's merit is it's small size and light weight (900g), rather than being too groundbreaking, and it's cheap price - I bought it from Toys R Us (of all places!) for just £219. It is pretty groundbreaking in that the Eee 700 models come with Linux Xandros and runs free software, such as Pidgin instead of a version of MSN Messenger/Yahoo! Messenger/AIM/ICQ etc, Open Office, instead of the Microsoft Office package, and Firefox as its browser (which is obviously far better than IE anyway). While you can install Windows XP on it (it comes with instructions) why would you want to? XP is a resource hog and while the Eee runs fine on Linux with no real lag, I can't imagine it would run so well on XP, especially without upgrading the RAM a bit. (Asus have said that it will not void the warranty if you upgrade it to 1GB.)

I bought one because I wanted a laptop for uni, but most laptops are quie bulky and awkward to carry around - you need a laptop bag (which shouts 'steal me'), and they are pretty heavy too. They are also expensive, and considering I have a good desktop, so when all I'd want it for would be word processing and web browsing it seemed ridiculous spending so much on it (and, you know, poor student etc). The Eee seemed ideal.

However - to the point of this post. Asus are soon to be releasing the Eee 900, which will come with an 8.9" screen (and higher resolution, 1,024 x 600), 1gb RAM, better webcam (1.3 megapixels). It will also be available to buy with either XP (with 12gb harddrive) or Linux (with 20gb harddrive). This will mean a slightly higher cost (£319, I think) but I think it seems pretty worth it - they are still far cheaper than most laptops out there, and will keep the small a5 size (which is the whole point).

And, if this wasn't enough to convince you to get one, STEPHEN FRY HAS AN EEE TOO :D :D :D

(No, I am not being paid for this. But I should be.) I just think they are great little laptops that everyone should get! They are pretty in demand so seem to be quite hard to come by, but they are definitely worth it.

/geek