I recently purchased an ASUS Eee PC 900. The one with Xandros Linux and the 20GB of solid state storage. I haven’t posted about it yet because I’ve been deciding just what I think…
I confess that I purchased the machine because I thought it was kewl and I wanted to play with it. Of course I had to justify the $550 purchase to myself somewhat further than this, so I told myself I was going to use the machine as a notebook… i.e. for taking notes and for researching things! Three things got in the way of this goal.
First of all the keyboard is very small. When I first started using it, my accuracy was an abysmal 50%… But after just a few hours of playing/typing that has been mostly resolved. I think in general I’d like a slightly wider formfactor with a wider screen and a wider keyboard, but I love how light this thing is and how long the battery lasts (esp. with the screen brightness turned down, audio off, wifi off if not needed, etc)…
The second issue that is hard to get used to is the screen resolution. Granted 1024×600 is a fair amount of real-estate for such a small (8.9″) screen, I would sure like a window manager that didn’t take up quite so much space for the titlebar and borders. Initially my main issue was with screen real estate for web browsing. Good ol’ F11 works wonders for this in FireFox, but I like the Flock full screen mode a bit better, and I’ve been moving towards Flock on all my environments, so my first customization was to upgrade the ootb Firefox browser with Flocks. I also added my favorite Firefox extensions like: Download Status Bar, Del.icio.us Bookmarks, DownloadThemAll, Google Gears, Greasemokey, PDF Download, Stylish and AdBlock Plus. I also added the AutoHide (the website is not pretty, you can see a LH review here) plugin which allows you to default to opening in FullScreen mode and also to configure that certain toolbars/status-bars can auto-hide show when you move the cursor near the top of the screen.
For note taking I played with the native Baskiet application, which allows for really pretty note taking but I kept coming back to wanting to synchronize my notes with my other computers.
The web interface to Evernote is acceptable, except you can’t use it when offline… I saw a post about How to install Evernote 3.0 on Ubuntu, and figured it might be possible to install the windows version of Evernote on the Eee PC using WINE. So first I had to install WINE using: Getting WINE to work on the Eee PC. Then it was a simple matter of installing the windows Evernote client. It does crash on occasion, but it’s pretty stable and being able to take notes in my “notebook” and have the content sync to my Mac, Ubuntu and Windows computers, is super!
As a minor aside, I noticed that the Windows version of Evernote has the ability to create bulleted lists. I sure hope this makes it into the Mac client sometime soon… Note taking (in meetings esp) without bullets is pretty broken…
