Maybe this product is why Palm bailed on the Folio...
Either way, I'm increasingly impressed by Asus. I use their motherboards almost exclusively when building my PCs at home (3 at the moment with ASUS MBs). I'm sure they brought the same quality and attention to detail to these mini laptops.
I bought my father one of their Celeron-based laptops last year and it was extremely poor quality. The main issues were performance, which was abysmal despite a relatively good spec, and fan noise -- it was as loud as a desktop PC.
ENE Technology, Inc. [VID 0CF2]
UB6225 [PID 6225] - USB 2.0 SD Card Reader Controller
So let's hope its firmware is capable of reading SDHC.
I guess that's a fairly cheap (and nasty?) solution... one would have thought that most card readers would be getting on the SDHC bandwagon by now - I've had a SanDisk mini SDHC card reader for almost 9 months!
It would have been very silly of Asus to have released this without SDHC support, or at least the ability to update it in future - good to see that it appears to be SDHC compatible out of the box!
I had one of these on pre-order but cancelled it when the n800 price drop hit. .
Funny, I had just about persuaded myself to buy an n800 now that the price has dropped, but I think I will stick with my 770 and look out for an EEE.
The 770 makes a great ebook reader, but I am less happy with its performance on other applications.
The EEE's clamshell format makes will make it less usable as an ebook reader, but the other apps look good. The notion that you can plug in a real monitor, keyboard and mouse when you want is very attractive.
If (when?) they had made this into a tablet format then I think that Nokia would be in big trouble.
The Eee is tiny. I didn't realise how small it was until I saw the pictures at this site: http://www.eeeuser.com/
Grab a standard DVD movie case. The Eee is just a little bit bigger than that when closed. It really is very small. It's not just a small notebook. It's in a new category of its own. Too large for the pocket (unless you wear cargo pants) but it'll just slip into any bag. Even a handbag, if you're a lady.
My concerns relate to that screen. It's 800x480, the same as the N tablets, but it's physically larger and I'm not sure any attempt has been made in the apps to cater for the small screen. In other words, you'll still see toolbars hogging the screen.
That said, it's effectively just another x86 hardware device, so you can do what you damn well please with it when it comes to software. If I bought one, I'd be keeping a close eye on the Ubuntu Mobile project.
This is one area where it wins over the more esoteric hardware of the N tablets.
My concerns relate to that screen. It's 800x480, the same as the N tablets, but it's physically larger and I'm not sure any attempt has been made in the apps to cater for the small screen. In other words, you'll still see toolbars hogging the screen.
True, but I find that most of the time I use 150% magnification on my 770 and I suspect that with a physically bigger screen this might not be necessary.
If you go through the achingly slow Flash demo at: http://eeepc.asus.com/en/guide.htm
and choose 'work' then you will see EE using openoffice complete with toolbars. On my monitor it shows in an approx. 7" diagonal window. I think I can live with that on the road - especially as I can plug in a bigger monitor at home.
