* There has been a price drop in the ASUS eee. It now costs P16,000.00.
Hello ASUS eee. You’re finally here in the Philippines. Your proud owner allowed me to fiddle around with your real estate for the better part of the evening and here are some of the notes I took down:
- P17,000.00 flat for the mini laptop. The eee runs on a 533MHz processor with 4GB of hard disk space and 512MB of RAM. If you add P1,200.00, you get the RAM bumped up to 1GB
- Available colors are in white, black, pink and light blue
- Mouse buttons are a bit hard to press and the mouse pad is a little small
- Ultra light and ultra small
The best thing about the eee is that it doesn’t feel cheap for P17,000.00. The elegant exterior reminds me of my black MacBook and it comes packed with everything that makes a laptop a great blogging machine. For less than P20,000.00 you get a portable computer with a mic, webcam (with recording capability), WiFi, three USB ports and a SD/MMC card reader. It comes built in with Google Docs, Open Office, Mozilla Firefox 2 and a bunch of other open source applications like the game Mr. Potato Head.
Should I buy this even if I already have a laptop?
Wasn’t this what the Palm Foleo wanted to address? The niche market that allegedly existed between the PDA and laptop converges here to the ultra light ASUS eee. Though the keyboard takes some time to get used to, it is still pretty decent and relatively comfortable to use for typing long documents. You may want to buy an external USB mouse than use the track pad as it feels a little small.
If you already own a notebook computer yet you feel that you can do away with the optical drive and settle for a smaller screen in exchange for portability, I encourage you to give this a try.
Verdict
The ASUS eee is not powerful but it sure is hella convenient for getting your dailies done. The no brainer price is one of its biggest selling points especially if you are a casual computer user.
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