Sub-notebooks or Ultra Mobile PCs (UMPCs) have been around for quite a while now. They have a smaller, lighter footprint than standard notebooks, thanks to their smaller screens and because some features (like the optical drive) having being taken off. Most of the sub-notebooks that were in the market till 2006, however, belonged in the premium segment, making people think twice before investing in one of theses. Then in 2007, Asus changed all that by giving the world the Eee PC. Considered as an offshoot of the OLPC idea, the Eee PC has made portable computing come within the reach of a large segment of the general public who couldn't afford it thus far. We're sure you'll want to know what it's like, and what we think of it, having spent a while using and testing it. The bundle consists of the Eee PC, the battery charger, a soft case, and a driver CD. I liked the one-piece adapter (it's not of the typical bulky kind laptops use) -- it's only slightly larger than your average cell phone charger, as you can see.

Specifications

A lot of things you usually see on standard notebook PCs are missing here -- a proper hard drive, optical drive, S-video port, Bluetooth module, FireWire port, and PCMCIA / Expresscard slot. This stripping-down, along with the smaller screen size, help to bring the weight down by more than a kilo. But in these times of plug-n-play, the presence of three USB 2.0 ports is greatly appreciated. But it's clear the Eee PC and traditional laptops belong in different leagues altogether; it wouldn't be right to compare them. <__PAGETITLE__The Basics__/PAGETITLE__> Design and Construction When I saw the Eee PC in print ads, I imagined the device to be bigger; I realized how small it really is only after I got my hands on it. The Eee PC 4G is available in black as well as white. The white model looks like a shrunk Apple MacBook, and the black one (which we received) has that "business-professional" appeal.

So you can see how small the thing is, here are a few pictures of it alongside my 15.4-inch HP Pavilion notebook.

They look quite the father-and-son pair

The Eee is a little more than half as large as my HP laptop Here's a look at the placement of the components. <__PAGETITLE__Design and Construction: 1 of 3__/PAGETITLE__> Front: The status LEDs in the right corner are visible even when the lid is closed. They display the Power, Battery, HDD activity, and Wireless status.

Left: The Ethernet port, one USB port, and the mic and headphone jack are here.

Right: The SD/MMC memory card reader is here, along with two more USB ports and a VGA port. Back: The power port is here, along with the battery, which protrudes slightly downwards. This tilts the laptop's keyboard a little, making typing that bit more convenient. <__PAGETITLE__Design and Construction: 2 of 3__/PAGETITLE__>

The small 7-inch display has a good resolution of 800 x 480; it's pretty bright. Above the screen is the webcam; though it's not as high-res as the 2MP sensors on standard laptops, the quality is decent. In low lighting, I got around 10 fps, and a respectable 30 fps in good lighting conditions. The cam can record videos in the OGG format -- pretty usable all in all.

"Hand-held" -- in the true sense of the term The screen is covered on both sides by two strips of speaker grilles. The speakers deliver decent output, though a bit lower on quality as compared to those on a regular laptop. Below the screen is the "compressed" sort of keyboard; in order to fit a full QWERTY keyboard into the shorter-width frame, the size of the individual keys has been compromised upon. The first time I used the keyboard, I was sceptical about it.

I was gradually able to get used to it; I can now type decently fast, though there is the occasional typo. People with large hands might have a problem when they try typing on it for the first time, but let not that first impression be the last -- you can get used to it, even if it's got to be called "cramped" in the end. The touchpad is smaller than usual, and there's only a vertical scroll line on this one. Space restraints probably dictated that a horizontal scroll line couldn't be incorporated. I had one problem with the touchpad from time to time: although the pointer navigation was all right, it did not respond to tapping well enough -- I sometimes had to use the buttons. The Eee PC is built of traditional hard plastic materials like the ones used in typical notebooks. The build quality is good; it doesn't feel cheap at all, even though it is, price-wise. Even the screen hinge is pretty strong. <__PAGETITLE__Design and Construction: 3 of 3__/PAGETITLE__> The Operating System The Eee PC runs a heavily-modified version of a Linux distribution called Xandros; yes, it doesn't run Windows. This, in all probability, was done with the idea of keeping the price low. But I must mention that configuration-wise, the Eee PC is capable of running Windows XP. Asus also provides a CD with Windows XP drivers, should you feel the need to install XP on it after purchase. Coming back to the OS, I was surprised to see how fast it boots up. It took the laptop just 20 seconds to power up and be ready for action. Main Interface The Home screen comprises a couple of tabs with large application icons that take up the entire screen. These app-icons have simplified names according to the task they perform. Here are a couple of screenshots:

The Internet tab consists of Web-related apps like a Web browser, a multi-protocol messenger, and a wireless manager

Here we have the OpenOffice.org office suite, which is fully compatible with MS office documents

This tab gives access to a couple of games, a media player, a media manager, a webcam app, and more

The settings tab has various tweaking, setting, and diagnostic tools <__PAGETITLE__The Software: 1 of 2__/PAGETITLE__> There's Mozilla Firefox for Web browsing; as you know, it has a tabbed interface and performs nicely. It's generally considered faster than Internet Explorer. One problem while browsing: due to the small screen size and resolution, and the fact that most pages are designed for bigger screens, there is the unwanted -- and dreaded -- side-scrolling. What's worse is that the touch-pad doesn't have horizontal touch-scrolling, and it was irritating to drag the sidebar every time I wanted to see the cut-off portion of a Web page.

See what I mean?

Streaming a YouTube video One thing I wasn't able to try out was video-chatting, because the inbuilt multi-protocol messenger (which supports Yahoo!, MSN, Gtalk, and more) doesn't have support for video-chat. I do hope they update the messenger to one that supports it. The OpenOffice.org suite is a very good alternative to Microsoft Office. Check out a review (from long ago) here.

The interface in Writer is similar to that of MS Word

Calc is the MS Excel alternative in OpenOffice.org Overall, I think the Eee PC's OS is one of the best iterations of Linux I've ever seen. Everything is simplified, and can be easily understood even by people used to Windows. Installing third-party applications may not be as simple as it is on Windows, but the OS comes with a sufficient number of applications required for everyday use. One prominent disadvantage of the Eee PC is its low usable disk space. The use of the SSD gives only a measly 1.4 GB for the user to play with; that kind of space would barely fit one DVD movie rip along with a couple of music albums. If you're considering it only for regular office use, though, 1.4 GB should be more than sufficient for word processing documents and spreadsheets, for example. The problem can be somewhat countered: a 4 GB SD card or pen drive (which retails for a little more than 1,000 rupees nowadays) can be used along with the laptop to boost storage space. <__PAGETITLE__The Software: 2 of 2__/PAGETITLE__> Performance Since this is a Linux-based notebook, we couldn't run our standard benchmarks to gauge performance. But my overall experience was that it runs pretty fast. Most of the time, multitasking doesn't make the OS drag. Videos were played back pretty smoothly, and data transfer rates were pretty decent, too. Battery Life, Heating, and Operating Noise: My first battery test consisted of the Eee PC being put in full brightness mode and connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi. I surfed wirelessly, played music off a memory card or the Internet, watched YouTube videos, and used the word processor from time to time. With all this, the battery lasted two hours and forty minutes. In the second test, I played a DivX video off a memory card. Here, the laptop's battery stayed alive for almost two and a half hours. That means good battery life; under power-saving conditions, the laptop should definitely be able to give you more than three hours. With respect to heating, my experience suggested that the Eee PC heats up about the same as compared to standard laptops, if not more (when used for longer periods of time). It is definitely not a chilled-out machine, but you can't consider this factor a deal-breaker. Finally, when it comes to operating noise, there is almost none. That's mainly due to the absence of a rotating hard drive and an optical drive which also cause vibrations along with noise. The only little noise that is emitted is from the system fan, but it's hardly noticeable. This one's pretty much a silent worker. Our Conclusion The Asus Eee PC is available for a retail price of Rs 18,000, and that's well-priced for sure. That much cash will fetch you an upper-mid segment smartphone; the Eee PC can do a lot more. It's easier and more comfortable to type on its keyboard than on QWERTY-pad cell phones. The target audience would include pretty much anyone -- right from school-kids to business professionals. The Eee PC definitely can't be considered a primary PC; it simply is not meant to be one. It can very well be a perfect companion to your home PC. I'll sign off with this: this laptop is a worthy investment. I do think it has ushered in a new era of portable computing, and other manufacturers are come up with similar offerings. Review unit sourced from Asus India <__PAGETITLE__Performance, and A Verdict__/PAGETITLE__>