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Asus Eee PC 900
Author: Joe MartinPublished: 18th April 2008
The Little Things
It’s the little things that can sometimes make the biggest differences and, though the screen is definitely the most major and important improvement made for the Eee PC 900, it’s by no means the only way that the new model has been polished up.Let’s start on the surface and work our way in then. There are a number of subtle changes which have been made to the Eee PC 900, some of which you probably wouldn’t even notice unless you used an Eee PC 700 for extended periods.
The modem port for example is now gone from the left side of the chassis – and, before any Asus spokespeople start telling us again, no the original Eee PC 700 line didn’t have a modem. It did have a blocked off port though and some of the original material hinted that there was a modem included, but this turned out to all be a mistake. The Eee PC 900 corrects the confusion by removing any modem port altogether.
The inputs for the Eee PC 900 have also been re-done and improved, with an Asus spokesperson telling us that even the keyboard is new – something that will please current Eee users irritated by wonky spacebars. The general layout of the board is the same unfortunately, so you’ll still have to go over the learning curve to get used to the tiny layout and half-sized Return and Shift keys, but it isn’t all that big a deal. Within a couple of hours you’ll be perfectly at home, able to type out Jabberwocky at roughly the same speeds as normal.
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The trackpad has had major overhaul though at the request of current Eee users. The pad itself has been enlarged by a couple of centimetres so that it is now a lot easier to use, while the trackpad buttons have been made more angular and defined so that you can more easily distinguish the left mouse button from the right mouse button. We don’t see how that’s really all that useful to anyone with an IQ of over half a point, but it is different.
The trackpad has followed in the footsteps of the Macbook Air too – it gets all multi-touch on yo’ ass. The standard easy-scroll bar on the right of the trackpad has gone completely and Asus has instead introduced two-finger scrolling to make things a little bit easier. If you want to scroll through a document now then it’s a matter of putting two fingertips anywhere on the trackpad and using them instead.
The multi-touch pad has other functions too, working in much the same way as the iPhone in that you can now pinch your fingers together to zoom in or pull your fingers apart to zoom out. This idea works pretty well, though you can’t use it on some applications and won’t be able to use it to quickly increase the text size on webpages for example, but no matter.
The rest of the Eee is left unchanged for the most part, with the exception of the webcam which has been upgraded from some grainy 0.3 megapixel rubbish to a much better 1.3 megapixel camera – that’s a quantifiable upgrade of a whole megapixel!
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Of course, it doesn’t matter all that much really. The reaction most people have to in-built cameras is always the same. They look at it, play at making funny faces once and then disregard it forever. Maybe, if it’s a very lucky camera then the laptop will get leant to the girlfriend of the current owner and she’ll use to apply make-up when you’re the train to Paignton, going to see her sister’s family for the weekend.
There have been some minor changes inside the Eee though which are arguably a little more useful. The Eee PC 900 uses a solid-state drive still, but this time it’s been upgraded to a much larger capacity. Whereas you could originally only get a maximum capacity of 4GB, there’s now an option to increase that.
How much disk space you are actually left with may vary though since the 900 is going to be available in Windows and Linux configurations. The version we got hold of is obviously using the Linux setup and had 20GB of extra space left over, while the Windows XP version will have only 12GB remaining – we assume this is to cover the cost of the OS and not result in a higher price point.
Which operating system is right for you is a tricky question in the eyes of many, but for me it’s actually quite simple. Linux, pure and simple. It’s simple, to the point and impossible to mess up thanks to the cool restore feature which lets you completely restore the system to factory settings by tapping F9 during boot. That feature has saved my bacon more than once. The XP system may offer improved compatibility for some programs, but you’re sacrificing storage, simplicity and speed to get it. Unless there’s a specific program suite you need to run under XP, we’d suggest the Xandros OS is the flavour of choice.
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