Travel Tech

It occurred to me that perhaps I should start talking about travel technology in this journal. After all, I used to be a technology guru and I travel a lot. There was a time when just about the only technical gear I traveled with was my mobile phone, but these days, it seems I’m lugging around more and more equipment. It’s been almost 10 years now that a digital camera has been my constant travel companion. Maybe I’ll say more about those later, but for now I thought I’d discuss the latest addition, an Asus Eee PC.

For those of you that haven’t been keeping up, the Asus Eee is one of the more interesting new kids on the block. Not only is it small – the size of half a sheet of paper – it’s very light, and most important of all, it’s cheap. The early models (the 700 series), introduced last year, had a 7-inch screen; the small size owing largely to the placement of two large speakers on either side of the display. The latest models are the 900 series,which is what I purchased. These have a 9-inch screen in the same form factor, sans speakers. Not only is the screen bigger, it has a higher resolution, at 1024 by 600. The resolution was main reason I talked myself into waiting for this new model. The smaller screen would have been acceptable for writing, but I concluded that it wouldn’t be very good for web surfing – especially my own sites.

One of the reasons the Eee is so light, and cheap, is that there’s no disk drive. Instead, there’s 20 GB of solid state memory. This is the same type of chips used in flash memory cards and thumb drives. These days, 20 GB isn’t a lot of storage, but the truth is that you don’t really need that much in a laptop. At least I don’t. It’s not my primary computer. I use it mainly for writing notes and checking email when I’m on the road. The notes and other files I may need to create I can comfortably store on a thumb drive, since I’ll probably want to transfer them to my desktop sooner or later anyway.

One of the other things keeping the price down is the operating system, which isn’t Windows. You can get Windows on the Eee, if you’re willing to reduce the amount of memory, or pay more. The operating system is Linux, based on the Xandros variation. The advantage of Linux, aside from being free, is that it uses a lot less storage space than the bloated Windows OS. Of the 20 GB, only a mere 2 GB is used by the operating system and all the applications. It also boots very quickly. My Eee is usually up and running from a cold start within about 20 seconds.

Speaking of applications, the Eee comes loaded with everything you need to get things done on the road. For office work, there’s the full OpenOffice suite. It’s a rather old version (2.0.4) but it works just fine. The web browser is the Bon Echo variation of Firefox. There’s also the Thunderbird email client, PIM, instant messenger, and lots of other gizmos. To connect to the Internet, the Eee has both a built-in wi-fi adapter and a standard LAN port. The wi-fi supports the latest high-speed ‘g’ standard. It also has three USB ports and a SD memory card slot. Finally, the touchpad driver is set up to support two-finger operations. Those with iPhones know what this is. For the rest of you, this is a slick way of moving around the screen, especially when viewing pictures or images. By placing two fingers on the touchpad and moving them apart, you can zoom in on an image. Drawing the fingers together zooms out, and moving two fingers around pans the image.

Okay, so the specs are every little nerd’s wet dream, but can normal people use it? The short answer is: yes, definitely. The system boots into a full-screen menu system where each application is represented by a big icon, and applications are grouped into tabbed menus. To browse the web, click on the “Web” icon to bring up the web browser. There are even shortcuts to popular sites like Wikipedia, Google, etc. To write a document, click on the “Work” tab and then select the “Documents” icon. It isn’t your typical user interface, for Windows or Linux, but it will take you no more than a few seconds to figure it out. If you can’t, then put it back in the box, get your money back, and never look at another computer again, because you’re too stupid.

The main issue with extra-small notebooks is usually the keyboard. There’s a certain point at which keys become too small to hit with any accuracy. The Eee is perhaps right on the edge of what can work, but I’m adapting to it quite well (this entire post has been typed on my Eee while on a trip to Dubai), Granted, I’ve got rather dainty fingers for someone my size. If you’ve ten big sausages, you might want to give the keyboard a test drive before you decide.

The screen is crisp and clear. Function keys allow you to adjust the brightness, which can make it easier to read, and if you can live with a dimmer screen you can also extend the battery life. When you insert thumb drives or the like, the system will automatically mount them and ask if you want to browse the media using the file manager, photo viewer or music player. In a nod to Windows users, the drives are typically labeled using old DOS disk letters (D: for example).

So, is the Eee PC perfect? Well… no. The biggest overall drawback would have to be the battery life. With a notebook small enough and light enough to carry everywhere, you’d like to have enough power to last around eight hours or so. But the Eee can only last about two and a half hours or so before it needs to be plugged in.

Aside from that, my only other complaints have to do with the operating system. Asus has provided only a very limited version of Linux, and has limited the number of applications that can be installed easily. That’s understandable, since the amount of storage is limited, and the target market for the original versions of the Eee was the younger crowd. The fewer applications you make available, the less trouble they can get into. But the 900 series is quite suitable as a general purpose travel computer, and I’d like to install a few more applications, like a web editor, but that’s proving difficult.

A related, and perhaps more important issue, is with updates. Most Linux distributions that I work with, like Ubuntu and Fedora, are constantly being updated. Even with a mature release, there are usually two or three updates a week. Not with the Eee. There are rarely any updates, and as I already mentioned, the versions included with the OS are quite old. The OpenOffice version is about two years old, and cannot read newer file formats like MS Office 2007. The Firefox is version 2, which is scheduled for end of life at the end of this year. I’m wondering how much effort Asus is putting into supporting their own Linux distribution.

Aside from the battery issue, all the other points above are relatively minor. In the end, the Eee does what I need it to do, and does it very well, all in a package I can comfortably carry with me where-ever I go.