When we first saw the diminutive Asus Eee PC back in the fall of 2007, we were duly impressed by its capability to mix small size with a small price, and rightly predicted it would be popular with consumers and influential with other PC makers (although, to be fair, the OLPC XO and Intel Classmate first blazed the same trail in the education space).
At the time, we said the Eee PC could be the perfect secondary or travel laptop as long as expectations were kept modest, and we found its small screen, Celeron processor, and tiny flash-based hard drive adequate for Web surfing and working on office documents. Later the Eee added different colors and Windows XP, but other systems, such as HP's 2133 Mini-Note were already expanding on the original concept with bigger screens, more storage, and sharper designs, while keeping the price fairly reasonable ($599 for a Mini-Note versus $399 for the 7-inch Eee PC).
Just as the original Eee PC started to feel a bit dated, Asus comes out with an updated version, called the Eee PC 900. Although it occupies only a marginally larger footprint than the original, this new model finds room for a 9-inch screen, accomplished by moving the tiny speakers away from the sides of the lid, leaving more room for the display. With a much more reasonable 1,024x600 resolution (the 7-inch screen was a paltry 800x480), the new Eee PC 900 feels more like a laptop and less like a portable Internet appliance.
While the RAM has been bumped from 512MB to 1GB, and the onboard storage from 4GB to 12GB (or 20GB in the Linux version), you're still stuck with the same 900MHz Celeron processor. With new mobile CPUs from Intel and Via on the way, and more powerful mobile processors available in the Lenovo U110 and MacBook Air (both of which admittedly cost nearly $2,000), that's starting to look dangerously dated, especially now that, at $550, the Eee PC has passed the point of an impulse purchase.
- Asus Eee PC 900 (white, Windows XP)
- Toshiba Satellite P305-S8825
- Gateway P-172X FX
- Asus M70
- Dell Latitude D630
- Lenovo IdeaPad U110 (red)
