X-bit labs

Started by: No worries | Date 02/27/08

Comments: 20 | Last Comment:  03/04/08

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1. The hardware from Asus's Eee brand is too underpowered for even casual personal usage. EeePC can be used as a 2nd notebook but not primary.

While the smartphones getting stronger hardware spec (e.g. latest SonyEricsson X1 and iPhone), EeePCs will be brown away after 1-2 yrs.

I have my tower with all of my stuff on it. I don't really need to do anything intense when I'm on the road. Watching stuff on youtube is probably the most demanding thing I would do with a laptop.

And for smartphone performance: EEE PC v2 and v3 will blow it away too. What's your point? Moore's Law lives on.

note: I don't have an EEE but will when I have the funds.

I quite agree. YouTube, Outlook, Word, MSN, Skype, ... None of it is really that intensive. I have a home Desktop that I run all my main apps on, and my job is web based so all I need is a text editor, ftp client and an Internet connection, although a built in webcam and mic is always nice ;) Thus something light, and portable for the road, in a laptop is ideal.

reli?
Have u think abt the storage limit of EeePC?
8GB is not enough even for mp3!

Well. Moore's Law lives on for all other applications as well. There are now Ghz speed CPU for smartphones already! Notice that many mobiles have the horsepower to playback DVD quality H.264 webcast but not EeePC!

EeePC will be eventually eliminated if Asus don't add 3G to it!

2. The movement toward cheap computing that targets the real needs of 95% of all computer users has far more than Sony trembling with fear. These devices will have no cost room for Intel, AMD, MS or Nvidia. Graphics, OS and CPU power will come from companies willing to engage in the most extraordinary value for money battles.

Away from our main home machine, doing word processing, browsing, email, instant messaging etc, who the hell wants a heavy expensive power guzzling monster of a laptop. What I want is a return to the clamshell PDA devices of psion, but with wireless, generic PC compatible hardware, physical keyboard, and decent colour hi-res screen. That's what the eee provides. Indeed, that is what the new $200 handhelds from Taiwan will provide too.

The computer biz has enjoyed selling products with a cost and power way beyond the needs of most users for more than a few years now. Enthusiasts like myself like the idea of monster machines, but why on earth do most people even need more than one core, or gigs of memory. Today there are no projected software projects targetted at ordinary computer users that even need the power of computers several years old. Even hidef video decoding is becoming a near cost free part of the graphics chip just as 2d output did years back.

Sony is worse. An elitist brand selling overpriced crap to people with far more money than sense. When the 'little' person is browsing and reading PDF's on their $200 hand held, flogging the same facility to rich idiots for thousands of dollars will be impossible.

I think these new cheap handhelds are delivering the promise that the last generation of PDAs (palms and MS) so clearly failed to do. Psion got much closer, but had the misfortune of being too soon with respect to the available tech.

Oh, don't forget, MS, anticipating this time, had an initiative of their own to produce cheap wireless linked handhelds, but cancelled the project when they realised that they would hasten the day when ordinary users realised that the MS tax per machine was an outrage that could not be permitted to continue. By doing so, MS delayed the inevitable by maybe 2 years. Now MS is going to have to give away a version of its OS to run on these machines, if it doesn't want to be eliminated totally from this market (and imagine how much MS hates that thought).

"Today there are no projected software projects targetted at ordinary computer users that even need the power of computers several years old."

Try running Office 07 or Adobe Acrobat on a Pentium3 500 MHz and you'll see that that's just not true. Hell, my Pentium M 1.5 laptop with 2 GB of RAM even needs a lot longer to load Word 2007 then my C2D desktop.

Another thing your forgetting is how flash and the like has added a lot of bloat to the web. Even casual users will from time to time watch flash videos and they won' t be happy on acomputer zhich is "several years old". Another app is Google Earth. I'd like to see you run that on an old computer.

You call yourself an enthusiast, but I guess you've been using the command line in some Linux distribution over the last several years, because normal web and office apps DO use the power of modern systems.

If you install win XP, you can work on ALL applications for ordinary user with Sempron or Celeron with 512M of RAM, even pIII 500. You say try and see, but you obviously did not try! My friend has Celeron 900 and 512 RAM, riva TNT 2. I was very suprised when I saw that he works without problems in Office, surfing the NET, even CS3. Also whats better in Office 2007 and Vista in terms of productivity for ordinary user (95% users)?! Nothing! If you are working with Vista than it is your problem, because Vista was specificaly made for the purpose of taking some extra money from consumers (hardware, OS, etc.). You say you wait more for office to load, but I say how much, 1 minute, 2 minutes? I have notebook with 2G of RAM, Radeon 2600 512M, Dual core, etc. but never installed Vista on it, although I got premium version with notebook. I need strong notebook, because of compiling and doing some DX programming, but ordinary people do not need dual cores for anything. As a matter of fact almost all office application do not get anything from dual core, and your office probably loads faster on new PC because of faster HDD, not because of C2D. As for buying strong PC for games, its better to buy good console and some cheap PC for office with Win XP of course. Only stupid thing about Eee is that I saw there are Acer notebooks maybe $50 more expensive with 3x better performance. I think Eee is overpriced, it should be maximum $200.

Have to take a stab at your comment about Word 2007 needing a whole lot of system resources, negative creep.

See, what the eee shows us is that one can take much less in system resources to perform the same tasks, and I think that's something we've forgotten in an age when it doesn't matter how needlessly bloated the software is as long as we can make a computer that will run it fast enough. It has a fully functional word processor, spreadsheet editor, and so on and so forth, and does it perfectly well on 900MHz and 512MB of RAM.
I, for one, remember doing all my word processing in the 90's with Clarisworks 2.0 on a Mac IIvi that only had 20MHz and 20MB of RAM to work with, and that's including the resources needed for the OS itself. Are the extra features in the newer word processors (or anything else) worth the bloat of system requirements? Maybe that's what you should be asking yourself instead of simply stating "Well, Vista needs more resources than THAT!"

No, the eee was never meant to replace the more powerful desktops and laptops (at least that's not how I ever saw it). It simply provides an alternative for those who don't see the need to buy a state-of-the-art system when all they want is something that's nice and portable and relatively inexpensive that will allow them to perform regular tasks. Sure, it'll be slower at rendering things like flash movies and streaming video, but that's why you keep a better desktop/laptop at home while you have the eee for travel/class/work use. Most people, I should think, don't really NEED to watch flash movies or play Crysis or render high definition video on the run. Or, if you feel you do, maybe the eee isn't for you.

3. Someone wake me up when the x300 costs ~500.

ill be intrested in a new laptop then, not an underpowered low-storage paper weight, tiny featured plastic junk pile.. (air(overly expensive), ee(overly underpowered and under storaged), cloud(overly underpowered)

Long live the Thinkpad.

All glory to the Temple of Godgle!!!!

4. Products like asus eee-pc and everex cloudbook fill a niche for those who want super-portability,though I think they are overpriced at the moment.One with a 10-inch screen for around $200 would be killer.

Now that would be nice!

5. You guys seemed to neglect the cost of the SSD inside. Until SSD drops in price, we wont see any of your crazy $200 Eee.

In fact, I dont think you guys are being realistic enough. So much for saying over price under powered. Did you look at the report for the cost of the components inside Eee? And it also sounds like companies "shouldnt" make a profit for selling things.... getting kind of ridiculous really..

Everyone has their different agenda. Eee is very good for portability at that price. Now I dont have to look into expensive 2K+ laptops just because I want to carry a 2 pound laptop around not getting muscle sore.

If your life involves playing games, doing 3D rendering, floating point calculations ... Eee is a "plastic junk pile" to you (in fact alot of laptops will be a junk to you also). And I think you see my point now, tons of people don't need heavy processing power most of the time. Having a 2gig, dualcore laptop for my mom who just checks email, surf net and do some word processing is just ridiculously too much.

6. Personally the ASUS EEE is almost perfect for me as it is cheap, highly portable, obscenely light weight, and provides me with a usable wi-fi Internet connection for basic tasks and a suitable platform for low-spec work. Pity about the 7" display though.

Any laptop under 1Kg, with a minimum 10" screen, 4Gb memory and wi-fi for under £500 will be desirable! Some of us need to be able to work on the go without the inconvenience of some massive, heavy machine to lug around.

7. I've been searching for AMD based EEE competitors and I've found attractive offerings like the Kohjinshas. While an AMD Turion X2 ULV is missing there are Geode based UMPCs with higher screen resolution, LED backlight, functional power management and extended battery life.

While these devices can't run WoW in 640 x 480 as the EEE at minimum details, they have enough cpu and gpu power for office needs and far more mobility.

On the next page are the premium offerings by Sony and Panasonic.
With putting the EEE in the same category in their webshops the stores may even increase sales of luxury products.

I've found out that even a pandora handheld ( openpandora.org ) may fit my mobile needs. It is not cheaper, it has a weaker CPU, it's no x86 but it should do things like webbrowsing (WiFi or cell phone gateway), e-mail and homebrew games very well.

8. asus weeeee is wayyyy overpriced when you can buy a celery + 15" screen + 80GB HDD with a gig of ram for around ~ $50 more

Yes its heavier but if they made a similar specced machine with a 10" LED screen it should equal the eee in weight/portability/battery life and price with far superior power and storage

9. Underpowered...ha! The eee does 99% of the tasks you normally want from a laptop, and speeds are fine, it hasnt slowed down on anything, until now, even if i had 20 something windows open... No 3g? Actually, im online with a umts modem right now - worked out of the box in seconds. You wont do any rendering or autocad, but thats about the only things you cant do with it. And...its lightning fast boot times are priceless (about 20 sec, from standby maybe 3 to 5) - you want get that from any sony/apple high end machines out there. It hasnt got mch memory, but stick a 16 gig sdhc + 16 gig usb flash into it and youre fine...

oh, the small keyboard takes time getting used to (sorry for the typos), but thats about all of the negative sides to it.

Conclusion:With the eee Asus build a machine the world was waiting for, no matter what sony says: The enormous success the eee has is proof for that.

Oh, and sony can go on building machines with features nobody really needs with prices nobody wants to pay. (talk about the ps3 vs Wii....)

Short derail:
Don't bring video game consoles into this, it's off topic. Also, if graphics and system power didn't matter as far as video games went, we'd still be playing Atari or Intellivision or some other system where you control a large pixel battling some other large, differently-coloured pixels.

10. All the eee pc is meant for is checking email, browsing the internet, instant messaging, maybe make a spreadsheet or word document. It's basically a smart phone / PDA that looks like a laptop.

if that's all you need its great, if you want to play games, have a music collection, use third party apps etc.. etc... spend the extra money and buy an actual laptop.

11. I like the idea of a cheap and small EeePC-like device when I don't really need my notebook - you don't need a $2000 notebook just to check/replya to emails while travelling or on holiday. When you must think that the notebook may get lost or be stolen, you should protect important data, and Eee-PC is a perfect replacement of a PDA-style device but with a bigger screen and keyboard.

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