Asus Eee PC 900 review

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 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.