Asus Eee 900 mini laptop

With airline weight restrictions becoming more restrictive I've looked at a simple image viewer but they were always too simple. Half a year ago Asus came out with their 7" Eee notebook with solid state drive that looked interesting (they sold 1 million in 5 months) but at 800x480pixels and 8Gb max storage the specs were borderline.

Yesterday they announced the new Eee PC 900 with a 8.9" 1024x600 pixel LCD screen and 12Gb storage for the WinXP version and 20Gb for the Linux version (both at the same price of about $500). It has a full, though small keyboard, web browser, free office software (linux version), image viewer, and bunch of other software. With a 900 MHz celeron processor and 1Gb RAM you won't be running photoshop on it but it is perfectly capable to store and preview images on the road and a whole lot more.

Other extras are a 1.3 Mpix camera and a FingerGlide touchpad (two finger action to zoom images in/out etc, like the recent apple gadgets). There is also a build-in WiFi b/g as well as three USB ports, ethernet, VGA out for an external monitor, and a SD/MMC card reader. So you can make backups of all keepers on a separate SD card.

The whole package weighs in at a very friendly 2 pounds and although it won't do the heavy lifting, it does offer a whole lot more than a simple image viewer for a pretty decent price. For some reason it is released early in all kinds of places, including UK, but no mention of a release date for US/Canada.

Has anyone been using the 7" version on planning to get the PC 900?

Bart

Here they have one of the early and quite thorough Reviews

I bought one of the 7" models back around Christmas because I didn't like traveling with my 17" macbook pro. I Think they're great!

I bought the version with the 4GB solid state hard drive, upped the ram to 1G and put a 16GB SD card in the SD card slot. I also carry a little 2.5" laptop external drive for backing everything up to.

Given the anemic processor, these things are surprisingly snappy when running linux. They won't do any serious lifting, but they are more than adequate for getting a first impression of your photo and allow you to weed out the garbage before you get home. It's kind of like having a JOBO that also does e-mail, word processing, and internet as well. You can even transcode your movies into mpeg4 and watch them on the plane, in the airport or where ever.

On the down side;

1.) won't decode raw for most new camera's so you have to shoot jpg+raw.

2.) Tiny keyboard and track pad is aggravatingly small. Buy yourself a travel sized mouse.

3.) No aperture while I'm on the road

For less than $500 CAD (with the ram upgrade and SD card) I don't see how anyone could go wrong! The new version would likely be even better!

Mike

Yea, I just bought one for 'work' £200.

Going to be a big surprise when it goes missing every time I am on a dive trip!

Paul C

Mike, whats software there is for the Linux (regarding view / manipulate images ) that works on this device?

Looking at the specs, seems pretty limiting -and if you cannot really do much editing then it appears to have few advantages over one of the photo storage devices that can have up to 250GB hard drives, can store RAW, built in card reader etc. And for email etc, an iPhone or a Blackberry.

On the other end, for one pound more in weight, you can have a MacBook Air.

One aspect of the eee is its durability. With only solid state memory, this notebook computer is going to be able to take a lot of abuse. I'm looking at one to take on a long bicycle trip. God forbid, I might not be able to read my email!

Arnon,

The EEE PC comes preloaded with Gwenview and a funky custom interface. If you have a little skill with computers it isn't hard to install the full KDE desktop. Then you can add a couple of software repositories and get the more common unix stuff as well.

On mine I have installed;

dcraw (will convert raw files to tiff/png/jpg.)

GIMP (more advanced image editing)

ImageMagick (CLI image manipulation)

Gwenview (Basic image viewer)

The version of dcraw I have will convert raw images from the D70. I've tested. It claims support for the D300 as well but I haven't tested yet.

I've installed the GIMP, but have never run it from the EEE PC. People claims it runs quite well, but editing photo's on a 7" screen seems like a waist of time to me. I'd rather wait till I get home and am infront of my 24" calibrated monitor.

The same can be said for ImageMagic. I use it a lot at home but don't have a lot of use for it while on the road.

Gwenview does what I primarily want. It allows me to organize my images in to folders and view them in full screen. I dump both jpg's and raw files into the same folder. I use the filter function to show me only jpg's for that day and I evaluate whether or not there worth keeping or deserve to go straight to the trash bin.

Once I've decided which ones to keep, I use the command line to keep only the raw files that have a matching jpg. I use a for loop and an if statement that tests if a jpg exists with the same name as the raw file and then delete the raw file if not.

So:

for i in `ls *.NEF | awk 'BEGIN {FS="."} ; {print $1}'` ; do

if [ ! -s ${i}.JPG ]; then

rm ${i}.NEF ;

fi;

done

This is how I manage things and it is straight forward for me. Most will not be competent on the command line though so I wouldn't recommend that part. The EEE PC still gives you some basic tools right out of the box to backup, store and view your files. It's not a replacement for my macbook pro, but it does what I need and want while I'm on the road.

Cheers,

Mike

Great info Mike, thanks.

I really consider purchase this device before my next diving vacation.