7iDigital

Since the launch of ASUS Eee PC 4G on our website, many people have inquired why should one buy this machine. This blog entry attempts to answer some of these questions:

Q. Why should one buy the ASUS Eee PC 4G?
A. ASUS Eee PC 4G has been a rage all over the world ever since it was launched by ASUS. Some of the main reasons for its success have been:

• Very light weight. At less than 1 kg, it is about 1/2 to 1/3 the weight of a “regular/ larger” laptop. This makes it very attractive / appealing for the traveler.
• SSD based storage keeps the laptop temperature low, unlike “regular/larger” laptops where the temperature can go as high as 60 degrees C under normal operating conditions.
• With the pre-installed Linux operating system, this is a very reliable machine with no risk of viruses.
• Linux requires very little resources to run - which implies longer battery time. Typical user experience has pegged the battery life at 3 hours

These factors make this a very useful computer for the traveling professional as well as for the home users. Longer battery life (not just under test conditions) ensure that this is a highly portable device.

Q. What about the applications available on Windows - are there compatible applications available for Linux?
A. Yes - there are many applications available for Linux which are compatible with their Windows counter-parts. Refer to the list below for some of the most common applications:

• Documents: Openoffice.org provides applications that are compatible with MS Word, MS Excel and MS Powerpoint.
• Email: There are many good choices when it comes to email client applications but we have found the Zimbra Desktop to be a complete solution comparable to Microsoft Outlook
• Movie/ music Player: VLC is a cross platform media player and support most of the media formats supported on Windows.
• Instant Messaging: Pidgin is a multi-protocol instant messaging client. It currently supports MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk amongst many other protocols.

Apart from these, Wine support execution of Windows applications on Linux. When running applications through Wine, you get the reliability and security of Linux as the underlying platform while you run many “native windows applications” on Linux.

Q. The default 4GB storage is “too small”. Would this not be a constraint for normal day-to-day usage?
A. The ASUS Eee PC 4G is an ideal computer for mobile users, perfect for someone who already has a desktop. Since this is a Linux machine, the operating system and common applications take smaller space (compared to their Windows counterparts) leaving a larger chunk of the 4GB storage for day to day activities. The storage does have a tendency to get filled up quickly and hence it is ideal to store any media files (movies etc) to an external USB pen-drive and use them from there.

Our Recommendation: we recommend purchasing the Eee PC for home users as well as for traveling professionals as a second computing device.