Let’s get one thing straight: I am not a laptop person. I like my full-sized keyboard, mouse, and screen, thank-you-very-much, and for me, there’s just very little incentive to go with a laptop. I much prefer to be able to swap out pretty much anything (new hard drive, new video card, etc.) rather than be stuck with what the manufacturer gave me.
However, with that said – I still want an Eee PC. If you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t heard of this before, click the link to see one. Basically, the Eee PC is a “sub-notebook,” or “ultraportable” – or maybe even a whole new category of small laptops. Instead of trying to be as powerful as a desktop computer (but portable), it instead tries to be as small, lightweight, and energy-efficient as possible.
It uses a low-power CPU (think: 900 MHz Pentium-M) and instead of having a hard drive (with moving parts, which suck power) it has a solid-state hard drive – basically, a large capacity USB thumb drive. So no moving parts. It’s a bit like having a RAM-drive (for those of you not old enough to remember what that is, go look in Wikipedia) for your OS.
Of course, solid-state memory is still expensive, so it does not have much capacity, but solid-state memory is very fast, so it boots up quickly. And it runs a special version of Linux, so it doesn’t require much space anyway.
Having said all that, you might ask, why I would want such a thing? And what could you reasonably do with so little storage space?
The trick is to not think of it as a replacement for your desktop PC. I would never get rid of my desktop, even if I did get the Eee PC – instead, the Eee PC would supplement my regular desktop PC.
The Eee PC is basically an ultra-light interface to the web – and with all the stuff you can do on the web these days (WordPress, Google Docs, Gmail, etc.) why would you need any apps on your computer other than a browser? So in that sense, the Eee PC would be perfect for me as a mobile web platform. I could look up stuff in Wikipedia while watching specials on the Discovery, History, or Science channels (as I often do), I could write blog posts (such as this one) while sitting on the couch or on the porch, I could stream music from my desktop PC – the possibilities are endless. And since it’s so small and lightweight, I could take it just about anywhere. (And since it’s Linux, it’s capable of doing quite a bit once you get there!)
And did I mention it’s also quite cheap (as in, “inexpensive”)?
All in all, the Eee PC would make a great extension to my “digital life,” if you will… and that’s why I want one!
