Flexknowlogy

The office bought ASUS EeePC 900s for Marc Hugentobler, John Krutsch, and me, and this tidy little tool deserves a review.

My review will be a little different from John and Ben Krutsch’s review, as I almost immediately set about wiping the Xandros Linux operating system (OS) and installed Ubuntu Linux, which I am using on several other computers.

Specs of EeePC 900

Review

The ASUS EeePC 900 is a compact, fairly light, surprisingly powerful notebook that will suit the needs of nearly any mobile dekstop computing user, providing they have good manual dexterity and eyesight.

Strengths:

• Small width and depth
• Good resolution for the size (1024 x 600)
• Sufficient USB ports (3) & SD card slot
• VGA video out
• Fairly lightweight
• Fast boot up (< 1min) and application starts
• No moving hard drive to farm
• Bright screen in normal, indoor lighting

Weaknesses:

• Average height
• Small screen requires good vision (disclaimer: my colleague John Krutsch has a visual impairment but did not complain about the readability of the screen size)
• Keyboard is a little awkward and uncomfortable for my hands
• Not as lightweight as I’d expected
• Limited storage space (I’ve set aside the 16gb 2nd memory for my storage space.
• Achromatic chassis may be boring to some
• No Bluetooth or WAN

It’s fair to say I have high expectations for laptops/notebooks. I’ve owned half-a-dozen different brands of laptops (Panasonic, Dell, Fujitsu, Toshiba, Lenovo, Texas Instruments/Acer), and so far my favorites have been Lenovo, Fujitsu, and Dell, in that order. In fact, I now own two Lenovos which I use 90% of the time—a Thinkpad T60 for my “desktop replacement” with a docking station, and a Thinkpad x60s as my writing notebook.

Because the EeePC was predicted to replace my Thinkpad x60s in my workflow I reviewed the EeePC in comparison. It’s important to keep in mind that the EeePC costs three times less than the Thinkpad x60s, and ASUS certainly didn’t intend for it to be a competitor of these higher-end laptops. I run Ubuntu 8.4 on my Thinkpad, and for the basic word processing and Web/Internet apps I used there is very little noticeable advantage to the Thinkpad in terms of speed, which is a strong mark for the EeePC.

The battery life of my charged EeePC was labeled at approximately 6 hours, though I will update this information tonight after I let it run down.

Obviously the Thinkpad has a larger screen and a full-size keyboard, and so it wins there hands down—by comparison, typing on the EeePC was painful, though the more I type with it the easier it becomes.. What really startled me upon comparison was how insignificant the weight difference was between the EeePC 900 and the Thinkpad x60s—the Thinkpad was a mere 6 oz heavier—not enough to really notice.

So while the EeePC is a compact tool of considerable computing power at an unbeatable price, it’s small size can be weighed as a disadvantage in terms of screen and keyboard usability. For my purposes, it’s not significantly lighter or more convenient than my Thinkpad x60s, and so to facilitate my writing work I will probably stick with the latter. I expect the EeePC to be very convenient, however, to keep in my office as a highly portable, on-demand notebook for toting around campus to meetings and appointments.

Applications for E-Learning

The most prominent application for learning with EeePCs comes from their low pricetag. At ~$400 USD I could imagine these being standard equipment for jr. high or high school students. If my son’s school had an established plan for integrating use of notebook computers into the daily curriculum, I would have no problem shelling out the money for one of these. Presuming that these could be used for at least 2 years, probably 3-4 if any memory expansions become available, the bang-for-the-buck potential is high.

The Xandros and the Ubuntu distributions come with Firefox for the Web, OpenOffice for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations, and Ubuntu comes with GIMP for image editing–this open source suite alone provides users with significant opportunities to learn and create right out of the box.

Collaboration or other connected learning opportunities are less apparent, but I think it’s worth considering further, even to the point that ed tech bloggers come up with a “best practices” list of ways to support engaged learning through these and other laptops (something the OLPC focuses on with Sugar).

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