Eeexperience
I finally had a chance to make a trip over to the only Microcenter computer store in the entire state of Michigan. Housed in the old Abby Theater building, it’s located in Madison Heights just a little bit southwest of Troy. I was tagging along with a co-worker whom we will further refer to as Levvy to protect his identity. So, Levvy and I headed over there to resolve a problem he had with his credit card when he made a purchase a day earlier…but I had an ulterior motive. I knew they had Asus Eee 4G’s there, and I wanted to check them out to see how this mini-laptop form-factor looks.
Ducked away from the service counter where Levvy was trying to fix his credit card, and headed back to the laptop area of the store. It almost was hard to find these things. In a sea of oversided laptops and large flat-panel displays, I found two little Eee’s sitting right next to each other in the back of the area. One was a black 4G, and the other was a white 4G Surf.
Wow, are these things super tiny. I couldn’t believe it. And just for funsies, it looks like the store purposely put them right next to a couple of huge laptops, one of them being Asus’s own G2S gaming laptop with a 17″ screen. I literally put one of them on the G2S and it looked like it could’ve swallowed it up.
So, we all knew that though, right? Of course they’re small. That’s the whole point of all this. Neither of them had batteries in them (they were powered by the cord). I’m assuming that’s so people don’t walk away with a 5-finger discounted one. So they were a little lighter than normal, but wow, super light.
First thing I tried to do is type on them. Fired up a browser and layed into the keyboard. I’m a touch typist and can hit some pretty fast speeds on a normal keyboard, but I’ll be damned if I couldn’t get 3 or 4 words into a sentence and I’d end up having to backspace because of errors. They’re quite difficult to type on if you’re used to the full size keyboards, but as I kept using it I could already see how I was adjusting to the size. I wasn’t having to hit the backspace key as much near the end of my Eeexperience.
One thing I noticed about the interface is that not only did they try to make it very simple to use by creating a tabbed interface with huge icons with simplistic names; they also made the windows and overall look of things very similar to Microsoft Windows. The traditional minimize, restore, and close buttons are very similar to Windows XP’s own buttons. I don’t think anyone would have a hard time learning how to use this UMPC based on the modifications they’ve made to the interface. Very easy.
Web browsing was a joy. It was fairly quick and really didn’t look all that different than my experience on my Windows PC’s at home….just a little smaller. Right away I could see myself falling into my daily routine of reading news sites, checking some stock prices, and posting on forums with this little device. I think in a cozy atmosphere like a coffee shop or a small table at Panera Bread, I’d forget I was using a little 7″ screen and the technology would become transparent to me.
I didn’t manage to take a look at any of the other apps on the device due to time limitations, but I did manage to fire up the webcam application on the 4G in black. I expected the kind of quality I used to get out of my parallel-port based QuickCam I had back in the day, but this was surprisingly colorful and the framerate was very good. Of course I wasn’t sending this video feed anywhere, just displaying it on the screen. But I found a few other customers that had recorded themselves in some files on the SSD. I played them back and they were pretty good quality for what this device has to offer. No choppy playback, in focus, and the colors were good.
I was very impressed with it, and think there’s a definite need for this form-factor out there. Unfortunately, I canceled my order for an Eee a few weeks back. I decided to place an order for a Cloudbook which improves on the Eee with a 30GB hard drive. But the keyboard, screen, and other design elements of these two devices are very similar. The Eee gave me a good idea as to what kind of experience I should expect on the Cloudbook, and I have to say I can’t wait to get it in the mail. It’s going to be a long 2 weeks to wait. I think anyone that orders either of these two devices, provided they understand the purpose of why you would get one, is going to be completely satisfied with their little mini-laptop.
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