Product Reviews

Until the Asus Eee PC 701 arrived last year, ultraportables - generally defined as any small notebook weighing under 2kg - traditionally commanded price tags upwards of £1000. Not the Eee. Rival makers were left scrambling to compete as Asus somehow came up with a machine that was smaller and lighter and cost a quarter of the price.

However, rave reviews in some magazines notwithstanding, nobody in their right mind would call the original Eee PC a desirable laptop. The lacklustre screen was too small for just about every application, and also for the Eee's case; the tiny storage capacity limited what you could take with you; and despite being quite cute at first glance, the whole thing was too fiddly and limiting to impress on any grounds other than cheapness.

Well, they've sorted all that. The Eee PC 900is just a millimetre or two thicker and still only weighs 1.2kg, even with the mains adapter included.Yet it feels incredibly durable. The glossy off-white chassis can't compete with the likes of Sony's TZ ultraportables for sheer gorgeousness, but it feels far sturdier. There's a little flex in the base, and the display creaks under pressure, but it's still impressively tough.

Tilt the lid back on its hinges and you reveal the biggest and best improvement. The speakers that previously filled the space left by the 7 inch display have now been secreted underneath the chassis, and the lid is properly filled by an 8.9 inch panel. With a resolution of 1024x600 pixels, it gives you

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a much more spacious desktop on which you can surf the web without having to scroll sideways. Photos and movies also benefit hugely.

Moving parts still don't feature in the Eee PC 900's storage, but there's now a 16GB flash memory drive in addition to the 4GB system drive. Though still small, that's enough for a small collection of music and movies, and both drives, being solid state, are impervious to the drops and knocks that can stop hard disks dead in their tracks.

Stiff little fingers

The keyboard is still as tiny as ever, and while it is of a high quality, the more chubby-fingered members of the Buyer team struggled to get up to their usual typing speed. The half-height Enter key and compacted Shift key don't help. Battery life is disappointing: the new Eee lasted three hours and 20 minutes sitting idle, a figure that pales in comparison to the six hours or so of pricier ultraportables. But you could always pick up a spare battery (about £50) and take it along.

The Eee PC 900 is available in two versions, one with Linux and one with Windows XP. Both cost the same, but the XP model pays Microsoft's licensing costs by losing 8GB of drive space. Some users will welcome the bundled Linux applications and wonder why anyone would bother with Windows (especially an old version); for others, the availability of Windows will be a deciding factor.

If you go for Linux, the pre-installed programs are gathered under tabs such as Internet, Work, Learn, and Play. OpenOffice is a worthy substitute for Microsoft Office; email and Internet are provided by Firefox and Thunderbird; there's a media player for music and movies, and you even get a range of educational titles. Installing other programs is more of a faff than in Windows, but you already have office, Internet, email and more.

If you're in the market for an ultracheapable, the Eee PC 900 has little competition - for now. By the end of the year it could be positively swamped with rivals, but they'll have to work hard to beat it. The Asus manages to rise above its limitations.