Digital Trends

Asus Eee PC 900 March 26th, 2008 | by Josh Norem

 Durability

Asus makes no claims regarding how far you can drop the Eee PC and so forth, but does claim that it’s shock-proof, largely because it doesn’t have a mechanical hard drive. We can attest it certainly feels rugged and robust. Though we didn’t do any drop-testing on it, we did find a video of a guy repeatedly dropping his Eee off several chairs and desks and it was no worse for wear.

Battery Life

Battery life is a big selling point for ultra-portable notebooks, and Asus claims the Eee PC is capable of approximately 3.5 hours, which is about average for an ultra-portable. We tested battery life by looping an MP3 sound file and browsing the web. We disabled the battery-saving feature that turns off the display when the notebook is inactive for five minutes. In our testing, we received a warning at 2:17 telling us the battery was low. Thirteen minutes later, at 2:30, we received another warning that the notebook would be shutting down in three minutes. Ten minutes later it shut off for good, netting us a total of two hours and forty minutes, which is decent but not spectacular.

Drawbacks

Though we’re impressed with what Asus has delivered for $400 USD, it’s important to note that it’s not for everyone. The screen is very small and it took us awhile to adjust to its size. The same goes with the keyboard, which is also teeny. As touch typists we had issues adjusting to it, and found we could only type well if we kept our fingers hovered above the keyboard rather than keeping our wrists on the palm rests. Finally, with just 4GB of storage space we didn’t have much free space leftover for data. Right out of the box we only had 1.2GB of free space. You can augment the storage situation with an SD card, however.

Conclusion

The Eee PC is certainly an interesting product, and is a very good product for just $400 USD. That said, its usability is somewhat limited by its small screen, small storage and Linux environment. Thankfully, Asus has already announced the next version will run Windows XP, have a larger display and a 12GB hard drive. Rumor is it’ll go for around $600 USD, but that is still a great price for what could easily be one of the best ultra-portable notebooks ever (for the money). As it stands now the Eee is good, but we can’t wait to see it get better with future updates. 


Pros:

• Decent battery life
• Highly portable
• Lots of useful software 


Cons:

• Tiny keyboard is hard to type on
• Screen is very small