Product Reviews

Asus's original Eee PC, the 701, caused a huge stir in the laptop market, and rightly so. Before it materialised ultraportable laptops were well beyond the reach of most wallets; yet for just £230, the Eee PC offered a fully functional, ultraportable laptop.

Click here for the full review of its successor, the Asus Eee PC 901

Sure, it wasn't perfect. There was no optical drive, the 7in screen was on the small side and, it certainly couldn't lay claim to being as drop dead gorgeous, nor as powerful, as premium-priced ultraportables such as Sony's VGN-TZ31. But the fact you could buy more than four Eees for the price of a single Sony opened everyone's eyes to just how cheap a laptop can be.

What the Eee lacks in good looks and alluring specifications, it more than makes up for with practicalities; and this new addition to the range, the Eee PC 900, addresses quite a few of the complaints levelled at the original.

The biggest change is that the tiny screen has been supplanted by an 8.9-inch panel, but while you'd expect this to make the 900 physically larger than its predecessor, it doesn't. Instead, the big black speakers which framed the original Eee's tiny screen have been moved to the underside of the laptop to make room.

It's a massive change for the better. Even with the specially tailored installation of Xandros Linux - a Windows XP version is also available, although we'll discuss the compromises later - the original's low 840 x 480 pixel resolution proved a little limiting for even the most basic browsing or document editing. Not only is the 900's screen physically larger, but its native resolution has risen to a far more manageable 1,024 x 600 pixels - enough to make surfing the web an enjoyable experience.

It provides good image quality too. It's no match for the likes of Sony's VGN-TZ31, but it's amply and evenly bright across its nine inches, and colours are vibrant and punchy. More disappointing is the noticeable graininess to the image, but it's not serious enough to impede day to day usage.

Room for manoeuvre
The rest of the Eee's specification has also had a slight overhaul. There's no sign of Intel's Atom processors yet, so the same Intel Celeron 900MHz processor beavers away under the hood. But the complement of memory has risen from 512MB to 1GB, and the hard drive has also swelled from the original 2GB or 4GB options to a much more sensible 20GB. The storage is spread between two drives, however, with 4GB provided by onboard flash memory and another 16GB provided by a separate internal SSD drive.

The 4GB partition is still a touch on the small side for the operating system partition, but, while the 16GB secondary drive is tiny by today's standards, it's a more than welcome improvement on one of the original Eee's major drawbacks. Now there's ample room for documents and collections of music and video files without having to remember to bring the right flash drive or SD card whenever you leave the house.

Thanks to the solid state disks, the Eee feels fantastically snappy in use. Our benchmarks can't be run under Linux, but we managed to get some of them running under a Windows XP installation. The 2D graphics and media-encoding segments returned scores of 0.28 and 0.33 respectively. That may not be fast, but considering the Eee's keen price, and the fact that intensive applications probably won't be its primary use, it's not bad at all.

Portable mixture
One thing which doesn't square with the Eee's highly portable nature is its battery life. Sitting idle, with the screen at half brightness and wireless disabled, the Eee lasted just 3hrs, 20mins. Note this was with the 4,400mAh battery, and that if you want the larger, 5,200mAH unit you can take advantage of Asus' slightly complicated option to upgrade to the larger battery for the Eee PC 900 for £10.

Further consolation comes in the form of a light power supply, but if you're planning

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an extended trip away from a mains socket we'd make sure to take advantage of that second battery.

As we've already mentioned, one thing that hasn't changed a jot is the Asus Eee's compactness. It's incredibly light, weighing in at less than 1.3kg for both the laptop and charger, and its small size makes it perfect for slinging in a bag on a daily basis. The build quality is impressive too, given the price.

The lid has a bit of give in it, but we had to press pretty firmly on it before we noticed any warping on the panel itself. The base is similarly sturdy and although it creaked a little when we really tugged at it, it still feels robust. Compared to the often delicate build of far pricier ultraportables, the Eee feels well up to resisting the abuse of a daily commute or the attentions of an over eager child.

The small size and fine build are both a blessing and a curse, though, as the compact design does end up compromising usability. The last couple of paragraphs were drafted on a packed commuter train, which pays testament to the Eee's handy size, but the small keyboard does prove a touch aggravating in use. Bigger fingers will struggle to reliably hit the intended key without the occasional mistype, and using the laptop in the bumpy confines of a train seat only compounds matters. Then there are the tiny right-hand shift and half-height Enter keys, which will take a bit of getting used to even if your fingers are on the skeletal side.

Apple-esque
One of the other additions is a MacBook-inspired multi-touch trackpad. Two-fingered gestures allow you to scroll through or zoom in and out of documents with ease and, generally, it marks a fine improvement on the original Eee's tiny pad. The single button is still overly stiff, though, and the pad's larger size causes problems of its own; where the previous trackpad was small enough to keep accidental cursor movements to a minimum, the new, enlarged pad isn't quite so practical. We often found a stray thumb moving our cursor mid-paragraph, and occasionally looked up to find that, somehow, we'd accidentally deleted the last few sentences we'd written.

Our test unit came with the aforementioned Xandros Linux pre-installed, which took up about 2.3GB on the 4GB OS drive. It springs into life quickly, and the simple tabbed interface is ideal for experienced and inexperienced computer users alike. Applications and online resources are divided between the four main tabs - Internet, Work, Learn, Play - which makes it quick and easy to find what you need. OpenOffice is just as usable as any of Microsoft's office packages, the Media Player played all of the files we threw at it and the capable partnership of Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird fulfils internet and email duties. There's even educational software installed in the guise of Tux Paint, Tux Maths and Tux Typing amongst a few others.

We'd recommend leaving it as is - the whole point of the Eee was to be a stripped down and cheap version of a full laptop, and the gradually upward-creeping price is purely down to people clamouring for the more advanced features of their existing laptops. Linux will do everything this laptop is intended for.

But we understand many users will want the flexibility that Windows XP brings, and it won't cost you any extra if you opt for it to be pre-installed on the Eee PC 900. Instead, the Windows version makes up its licensing costs by replacing the 16GB secondary hard disk with an 8GB model - if you have a copy of XP SP2 lying around you could buy the superior Linux model and simply install Windows yourself.

We've no doubt that many people are going to hail the Asus Eee 900 as another rip-roaring success and, at least in some ways, we'd tend to agree. But before you rush out and buy one, bear in mind that it's not without its issues: battery life is pretty poor by ultraportable standards; there's still not that much storage space; and chubby-fingered users are well advised to try before they regret their buy.

Finally, although that price tag initially looks very reasonable, and especially so given the various upgrades, it's beginning to tread on the toes of the cheapest fully-fledged Windows laptops.

But, frankly, for all its deficiencies, it really hasn't got much competition. The larger screen makes a monumental difference to its usability, and we think the additional cost is worth paying for that - just. We wouldn't buy it as your main laptop, but as a featherweight yet robust supplement to an existing laptop or desktop PC, it's still a bit of a steal.

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