Cus Productions

Took delivery of my EEEPC yesterday. So far it’s solicited many cries of ‘ahhhhhhhh’ at the office – it’s that cute Took a while to come though (see my previous post)

First impressions are that it’s fast enough to do everything I need. The resolution of 800×480 is enough to get all my usual jobs done without breaking out the big laptop unless I want to do virtualisation or development work. I’ll shift some of my pen testing utilities onto it to see how the wireless card fares, but I admit that’s quite a non-standard use for the platform. It doesn’t have a PCMCIA slot so I can’t do wireless sniffing and injection at the same time, but how many people need that? To the lay-person, this provides email access, web and all the office stuff they usually need, and they won’t even realise it’s running Linux. While the traditional Linux desktop is still trying to make inroads with home users via KDE and Gnome Desktop Environments, it’s hardware like this that will really have people using Linux. After all, it’s not about using Linux – it’s about getting the job done, which is what we’re all here to do.

This won’t replace my mobile phone (Mio A701 running Windows Mobile 6) and won’t replace my laptop (running Kubuntu), but then I wouldn’t expect it to. There’s room for a ‘middle ground’ in mobile devices when you need something with a usable built in keyboard and a decent screen that has room for user-defined applications for power users.

As an aside – I heard more and more parents were being asked to buy laptops for their kids for birthdays and Christmas. Maybe that’ll be replaced by this kind of device – big enough to comfortably use while being small enough to fit in a rucksack/satchel/man-bag. It’ll certainly be easier on the pocket