timothy's Journal: (Finally) ordered an Eee ...

I've been mulling over the purchase of an Eee (or similarly small computer) since the Eee was first announced, at the market-testing come-on price of $199. In the meantime, I did buy one of the buy-two-get-one XO laptops from One Laptop Per Child, and the XO is still way ahead in some ways of the various netbooks from Asus, Acer, Lenovo, and a bunch of others. Specifically, I wish the Eee and its ilk would

- have a transflective screen
- feature at least some variety of mesh networking ability; it's easy to be just outside an area of wireless connectivity and have no way of connecting through it, and it's easy to be just inside a wireless zone, often with perfect willingness to dedicate at least part of the available bandwidth to others in an act of enlightened self-interest.
- have a tablet-style hinge. Even without (as the XO is without) the ability to draw / write / tap on this screen, it's nice to be able to read on it, and (combined with the transflective screen) tablet mode makes for a pleasant reader
- feature better antennae; the XO's are excellent, both for being external and (at least I suppose) by existing in tandem. Even if having two in fact adds no appreciable reception range (which I doubt), I'm hopeful that having one of them disabled for some reason would leave the other functional.

However, my usual and quite nice portable machine is an Apple running Mac OS X, and owned by My Employer; I don't like to mess with its configuration (so it's still running only OS X), and while it has a lot of great features and is utterly amazingly light for its power and features based on my usual metric of "what would this have cost and weighed ten years ago?!", I'd get out of the house to work more often (as I'd like to do) if it weighed half of what it does. To that end, I finally decided that the tension of waiting for the perfect moment overcame my desire to see what crazy deals come up next month, or the month after that, etc. (Which, this being October, might mean some pretty crazy deals, in fact.)

My "use case scenario," by the way, is that I'll take this machine around town, to work from coffee shops, in libraries, at friends' houses, etc (mostly), and as a backup to one or more other portables when I travel longer-term (occasionally). When I went to Bainbridge Island earlier this week (Bainbridge is a pleasant and cheap ferry ride away from Seattle), I wished for a computer along with me, but not one that would have added 6 or more pounds to my bag, as does the MacBook Pro + nice Tom Bihn carrying sleeve.

The model I settled on is the Eee 1000HA. No bluetooth, conventional hard drive instead of solid state (160GB is way more than I need, but 8 or 16GB of SSD just seemed like it might be confining), Atom processor, screen not as dense as the 1280x768 on HP's models (too bad, I'd prefer that), and a lot of happy reviews. I like the look of MSI's Wind better, likewise the upcoming model from Samsung, and Lenovo's S10. I find the Eee to look a little awkward, in fact, but none of the current crop of netbooks really seem all that different from each other when viewed side by side. Oddly enough I think I like the keyboard on the (smaller) Aspire One a bit better, too, though I'm hopeful that will be proven wrong. For about $420, though, the Eee has a 10" screen (which I think I'll appreciate if I ever need to use it for an extended period), a 6-cell battery rather than 3 or 4, and a multi-touch (tiny) trackpad. I'm not completely sold on multi-touch, but I'm very slowly coming to like it better for scrolling pages in Firefox, so I'm pleased to at least have it available.

Originally, I had ordered from Amazon itself, with the promise of "free shipping" -- but I hadn't noticed that Amazon was actually out of stock, since I reached their order page from a small link on the site of another company's Amazon listing. When I saw the confirmation saying the machine was estimated to come late next month (November), I balked, canceled order, ended up re-ordering from another company, also with free shipping, and it's at least expected to show up within the week. It's cool that computers of such power (Again, "How much would this have cost and weighed 10 years ago?") are now available for $400 or even less. For around $300, in fact, I could have gotten something with the same screen size and processor, but probably only with half a gig of RAM and a 3-cell battery.

And maybe next month ATT or some other carrier will announce a subzidized-with-service deal where the same notebook will come with mobile broadband service "for free," which makes me even more glad that this is a question of a few hundred dollars rather than a few thousand.

Oh, and operating system. Mine's coming with XP; I wish I'd been able to find one sans Windows with the same package at the same or lower price, but couldn't. I'll play with it using Windows for a bit, at least until I scrounge an external optical drive with which to install ... probably Ubuntu (netbook remix or not), or some other Free OS. Windows doesn't even have a rotating cube!