First Full Review of New Asus Eee PC 900

An anonymous reader writes "After months of rumors, the new 8.9in screen Eee PC is out in the open and the first review is online. As well as the larger screen you get 1GB RAM, 20GB Storage and a multi-touch touchpad. It costs more than the old Eee PC, but it definitely sounds like it's worth the extra cash." I always thought the appeal of the original was the ridiculously low price, coupled with the ease of hacking. Not sure if the sequel will meet that challenge.

Battery life is a major downside

A less-than-2-hour battery life is a huge problem for a machine touting itself as an ultra-portable. Everything else on these new models are pretty much spot-on. But a short battery life sort of defeats the purpose, methinks, unless their slogan is "Take it anywhere, just not too far from an outlet."

Re:Battery life is a major downside

AFAIK, there are already 7800mAh and 10400mAh batteries on the market.

Re:Battery life is a major downside

Although I only have the 701 EEEPC model (I'm using it to respond to you now!), my battery life experience seems to match what they said in the article - namely, about 2 hours when I am watching a movie with the wireless on.

On the other hand, when I am on a plane with the wireless off and just typing or playing solitaire and listening to music, I get over 4 hours of life from it. So your usage pattern matters a lot.

Re:Battery life is a major downside

The real problem is Linux's lack of decent power management, as well as the hardware manufacturers' reluctance to support Linux in any way.

This may have been true in the past, but I'm telling you, I get 3.5h out of this shitty Toshiba U300, without wifi, 2.5h with. Powertop is a wonderful thing, but even without it, turning the screen down and making sure the CPU hits C3 leaves me with what I'd consider acceptable battery life. Windows doesn't far any better on this thing.

If it really was Linux at fault, wouldn't those people running XP on the eee get more battery life out of it?

Re:Battery life is a major downside

I figured some fanboy would scream foul and try to call me on my credentials.

Of course all evidence is anecdotal, even your acer story. I know what I'm talking about as much as you do.

So, umm, yes. I really do use Linux. I am a Linux system administrator and developer. I last touched windows on anything I owned over 10 years ago. I don't consider myself an evangelist, but I do promote linux as much as possible and our organization runs its server room 100% on linux and has for years. In short, Linux kicks butt.

Here's the deal. I've wanted to replace my PowerBook 12" for a couple of years now, so I've looked at the options. I'd prefer a Linux laptop. Every laptop I've looked at (Thinkpad X61, Dell Latitude D420, etc) all look really good in terms of specifications and do generally run Linux pretty well. But everyone that owns them and runs linux on them puts up with things like suspend to disk instead of suspend to RAM, and abysmal battery life, like 4 hours on the biggest batteries (like 8 or 9 cells). Right now I have a Windows user (XP) with a D420 and the standard battery. He gets 5 hours when aggressive management is turned on. Another user running Linux, on the other hand, hits 3 hours at most. *Every* linux laptop user I know has to fudge with ACPI scripts and things to get the various suspend and hibernate modes to work. This is partly the fault of linux distributions and partly fault of hardware manufacturers.

Running powertop on a laptop is also very revealing. Typical desktop software on linux is not very friendly to power management. Rarely does the CPU enter the lowest power mode on linux (forget the designation).

So do a bit of research and you'll see that what I'm talking about is generally true. Thinks are improving dramatically, but there's a long, long ways to go. Until then, it's really hard to leave my 5 year old PowerBook with OS X.

Re:Battery life is a major downside

I agree, theoretically the appeal of a device like this is that you can flip it open any time you need it, and riggity-jig-and-away-you-go.

On the other hand, how many people are buying this as a full time alternative to a full sized laptop?

I think we're still in the early adopter stage -- where most of the people who are buying it are just curious. Therefore it may be more important to meet certain psychological pricing benchmarks (e.g. it's closer to 300 Euros than 400) than it is to put a bigger battery in it. Then the people who find it seriously useful will buy a second battery, or a larger aftermarket battery.

Admit it; you've bought things on impulse for X dollars, then on impulse bought a Y dollar ugprade for those things, even though you probably wouldn't consider paying X + Y for the entire rig and it was just wishful thinking you didn't need the upgrade. That normal economic behavior for early adopters.

When the thing gets to the point where pragmatists are buying them, you can bet they'll sport much longer battery lives. Just the volumes they'll be buying parts in will bring the price down to stay "cheap".

Asus Competitors Competitors

I'm amazed at the competition [news.com] that has sprung up in this once niche market of tiny notebooks. I'm sure you're familiar with the classbook, Everex's Cloudbook and the OLPC [slashdot.org] but I just found out that HP [pcworld.com] and Elitegroup Computer Systems of Taiwan [htlounge.net] have direct competition for the eee.

They all seem to have pretty close pricing, for example the HP's 2133:

... anywhere from a $499 system running Linux to a $749 model using Microsoft's Windows Vista Business operating system. The low-end Linux version, which sports a 1GHz CPU and 512MB of RAM--is probably the closest matchup for the Eee. The Vista machine we review here today sits at the top-end with a 1.6GHz CPU and 2GB of RAM.

I'm glad to see healthy competition in this market. I know some people are going to hate the non-standard stuff going on with these laptops and there's going to be some dirty tactics to 'lock-in' countries to purchase only a certain brand for schools (*cough* Intel/Microsoft *cough*) but these prices are going to continue to be driven down. Which from $400-$500 is a great price!

While it may not be the year of Linux on the desktop, it's certainly the year of Linux on the super freaking tiny notebook that is difficult to type on (yes, I know what a USB keyboard is).

Swell...

It's a new low for /. when "First!" appears in a story title.

Re:Swell...

I was gonna say that I'm impressed by the fact that we've evolved as a community to the point where no one is automatically imagining Beowulf clusters of these... What paradox is this?!?

Phone/computer hybrid

What people like about the Eee is that it does 90% of what a computer does for the price and portability of a cell phone.

Toying with that formula is unwise. Instead, further pare down the bloated Xandros and XP installs so that people can use a 4-8 GB machine.

I thought they were going to install Intel's Atom in the next revision?

Regardless, the Eee is an important step for open source and Linux. See Asus Micro Laptop Brings Linux to the Desktop [chrisblanc.org].

Who wrote this?

From TFA:

Yes the price is higher than the previous model, but I personally believe that the Eee PC 900 still represents staggering value for money.

Thank you, Miss Teen South Carolina.

Evangelize

I saw a post the other day pointing out that Asus were not evangelizing Linux - it just happened to be the best O/S for their needs.

Well you could've fooled me. They're doing a better job than those that are doing it deliberately. 20G vs 12G, sweet.

They Didn't get the Weighting Right

I had the previous version of the eee and returned it after a few weeks. I bought it to use while traveling and it was functionally fine. But when I tried to use it in my lap (at conferences and on the bus, train, etc.), it had an annoying habit of flopping over onto its back. With the battery in the back undre the the hinge, there is not enough weight under the keyboard. When used at the slightest incline, it flops onto its back (to view the screen well you have to tilt any laptop down a bit when it is resting on your thighs). Hopefully they fixed this problem with the new version. Where did the speakers move to? if they put them up front that might help.

Their choice of Linux

I bought an EEE PC a month ago. Just last week I enabled the expert desktop mode after some fiddling around with a stubborn synaptic(ugh just purge the finicky entries, won't you?). I find it a lot easier to use than my Ubuntu server sitting downstairs(on a 700Mhz Athlon). Is it the speed? No. Ask me where I can set the mouse wheel scroll speed on the Ubunutu machine, and I won't know. Easily found it via the large-size Control Panel equivalent on the EEE.

Initially, I balked at the idea of having Linux run on such a nice piece of hardware, thinking I would switch to Xp instantly. Nope, I will keep it, even after years of frustration trying to use Linux as a workstation before. I'm not running it out of Linux advocacy, I'm running it since it actually freakin' works this time. Actively using google's apps already(gmail, etc), it was a nice little touch to have them linked already on the little frontent.

Sure, I can't quite get gcc running yet to compile downloaded apps, but I'm doing just great everywhere else. Hooking it up to a keyboard, mouse & monitor makes it a nice little workstation.

FREEEEE

I am working on a project to "liberate" the EeePC so it runs only Free Software as defined by the Free Software Foundation.

Already, most of the bits are there, but need to be patched in to the kernel (e.g. ACPI, "eee.ko", ATL2 ethernet). There is no free wifi driver working yet, but it is actively being worked on as a part of ath5k.

The other main non-free part is the BIOS. Hopefully someday we'll be able to get coreboot running.

My notes, docs, code, etc:
http://www.blagblagblag.org/pub/BLAG/developers/jebba/eee/ [blagblagblag.org]

git repository of patched kernel:
git://blaggit.blagblagblag.org/linux-freeeee

-Jeff

Re:xp?

If you add a bigger screen, upgrade the processor, double the RAM and quadruple the drive space it cost a bit more. But definitely worth the extra money!

Re:xp?

It's that thing sailing clear over your head

Wrong

No, you don't have a regular laptop. At 2lbs, the Eee 700 or 900 is about 2/3 the weight of a Thinkpad X61, about 1/2 the bulk, and about 1/2 the price as well. An X61 is a very small notebook by most peoples standards to begin with. It's already half the weight of the "average" ~5lb notebook, and much smaller than 6-8lb desktop replacement monstrosities. The Eee wins, even at the ~$500 I expect the US release to be priced at, by being a notebook you can literally carry in your (man)purse. Like a lightweight messenger bag.

Re:Wrong

While I'm not American, I will say that an extra 3kg or so is an inconvenience compared to just under 1kg. It's not as if we're all suddenly lacking the muscle mass to carry a 15" machine or that we're so lazy we don't want to expend the extra energy, it's that if you want a machine with you all the time then it will get irritating to carry the larger one - the smaller and lighter the machine, the more likely it is to become something you carry everywhere and thus have whenever you need it (or, to put it another way, if you know you're going to potentially need a laptop at any time while you're out, the eee is going to get much less annoying to carry all day every day).

Re:Wrong

Are you so fat and lazy that your notebook only weighs 6 to 8lbs? I have an old luggable that weighs 20 lbs. And its carrying case is no larger than a large briefcase.

Luxury. I carry around a full-sized tower under my left arm, an NEC 21" CRT monitor under my right arm, and an IBM model M keyboard on a specially designed carrying attachment on my penis.

Re:xp?

I have XP on my eee since I couldn't get it to talk to my school's 802.1x network. I honestly don't see many problems with it that the Linux version also doesn't have. It's all of 5 seconds slower to boot, it hasn't crashed and the screen size issues appear with any program that assumes a normal screen- there are dialog windows that run off the screen in Linux apps too.

I do miss the nice tabbed interface, but most of the bundled apps were pretty worthless and those that were actually useful are free downloads anyway.

The one thing I really want is a 2nd battery pack and external charger- the battery life on an eee is pretty maarginal.

Re:xp?

Of course on Linux you can easily hold the ALT key and drag the window to make the buttons visible. Not possible on windows without third party hacks.

Alt+Space,m,[arrow keys].

Re:xp?

all the XP drivers are included on the DVD you get which is also the restore disk for the base linux install.

my boss has one of the orginal ones.. and putting xp on it was no issue driver wise.. now cramming XP and office 03 on it for him .. that was a fun chalange.. ended up sticking in an 8gb sd card and maping it to the program files folder

but drivers where no issue at all

Re:the photos

You can get a full-sized laptop with twice the ram, more than 10x the storage, a bigger screen, etc., for under $500.00

I dare say you have completely missed the point of this device. The whole point is that it's not "full-sized".

Re:HPC Pro does the trick better.

Sorry, but I've USED Windows CE before.

I know just how terribly unresponsively it performs.
I know how terribly limited the selection of available software is
I know how crippled all the "pocket" apps are.
I know just how completely lacking external hardware drivers (eg. printers) are.

If you need more than something that just barely lets you type basic documents and sync them with your desktop, WinCE is a lame duck.

The HPC form-factor is quite nice, but the realities of using one for any length of time is not so pleasant.