Little Blue Cutie - But Not Polished Enough
Written: Dec 10 '08
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Ease of Use: |
 |
|
|
Pros: Great little homework laptop, good concept.
Cons: Just not powerful enough, screen too small, cheap toyish feeling design, poor software.
The Bottom Line: Good for homework but not much else, I'd look to newer models as the concept is good..
|
|
|
| americanbear's Full Review: ASUS Eee 2G Surf (90OA02AC0004111U105Q) PC Noteboo... |
What's this little thing?
Today, I'm reviewing the Asus EeePC 2G Surf. This little blue "netbook" computer is an early model, but they're still widely sold on eBay and the like. I just got about $175 for mine. Yeah, I sold it off, that should probably tell you what I think - but we'll get into the whats and whys in a moment here.
The 2G Surf was Asus' low-end entry into a brand new market known as the netbook. With 2GB of flash memory (the "2G") and 512 MB of RAM, a 7" WVGA screen with a low-spec (but never exactly stated) Intel Celeron processor, the 2G Surf would be a high-spec computer (with a TON of RAM by standards then) in 1998 or so. However, seasons change. Ten years later, it doesn't quite cut it even for web surfing.
This whole type of product - the netbook - was born out of the concept of the $100 laptop for kids in third world countries, and the manufacturers that realized there was demand here in developed nations as well.
Physical Design
The 2G Surf, and other original EeePC models, is like a laptop in miniature. Don't get me wrong, this is not a sleek, beautiful, Apple-style design. Rather, it's a cheap PC laptop shrunk down. Cheap-feeling plastics, ugly construction, and overbuilt in places.
The 800x480 resolution 7" screen is simply not adequate for viewing most webpages, and feels cramped for other uses as well in an environment designed for larger screens. The battery life is short, and and the ugly design looks more like a cheap toy than any serious tool.
And like a good cheap toy, you have your choice of Black, White, Blue (the model I had and am reviewing), Pink, and Green. The flip-out power adapter is compact and well-designed, making it one of the best aspects of the design.
Additionally, while the plastics may be cheap and ugly, and the design overbuilt - this does bring a certain durability. The EeePC is not a machine I would worry about breaking - even if given to a young and irresponsible child. The screen is well packed in, reducing the likelihood of it cracking, and with overbuilt hinges and no hard drive to crash there just isn't much else you could break (except by spilling liquid on it... it's not sealed and watertight; which would be a good thing given the target audience!)
Connectivity is limited but should be more than adequate for the machine's intended purpose. It has USB, VGA, and an SD card slot as well as audio in/out. The SD card slot is nice as you can pick up an 8GB SD card pretty inexpensively to boost the 2GB internal storage, and the VGA output means that you could use it as a presentation computer for showing simple slides, however do not be expecting anything beyond basic business and classroom presentations - this machine has neither the software nor the power for truly amazing results.
The battery will only run the machine for about two hours in my experience, adequate to get on something quick, but not for seriously working with it. Prepare to carry around the power supply - thankfully it's so compact!
Software Design
In seeking to make this machine for as little money as possible, Microsoft Windows obviously just was not an option. It's slow, takes up more then 2GB of room on it's own, and is not really designed for such a small screen. People have had luck installing Windows XP, but why? It's just a really underpowered little computer then that's not that cheap.
No, in order to truly impress, Asus needed to create their own operating system. And this is where they could have truly shined. A beautiful, polished operating system designed to work smoothly on the limited hardware and screen size could have made this device *the* must-have portable computing machine, and overcame all hardware limitations.
Sadly, unlike Apple (see the iPhone and iPod Touch - review coming soon), Asus didn't manage this. Instead they created their own Linux distribution with an "easy" launcher for Firefox, OpenOffice, Skype, Pidgin IM, and a few other Linux programs.
Firefox and OpenOffice are not designed for small screens! While OpenOffice is usable, and I can even see arguments for the choice, I do not understand the decision to go with Firefox at all. It simple doesn't scale webpages for that small of a screen. Opera would have been a much better choice.
Hacking - The Redeeming Possibility
Fortunately, Asus has made it relatively easy to eliminate their easy interface and give you a KDE desktop (where it becomes obvious it's just running Xandros with a few modifications). At this point, while KDE isn't designed for tiny screens, you can install Opera (a web browser that works much better on the little screen) and have a somewhat usable little system that is convenient.
If you want to get further into hacking, it's an open platform that you can write your own software or create your own Linux distribution for. You can attempt to succeed where Asus failed - the software design.
But let's get real, you're much more likely to just buy this for the kids, and how does it fare then?
For the kids...
Well, I think I've pretty much established that this machine won't cut it for most of our general computing needs. So lets think about it as a machine for the kids... is it so bad then?
Not really
The small keyboard will fit kids' hands well (in fact I actually find it just as comfortable as my MacBook keyboard once I got used to where they keys are, and both are actually better for me than a full-size keyboard), which makes it great for doing homework on.
For entertainment and web surfing an iPod touch is better - yes, the eeePC has a full Flash Player and all that, but the iPod touch does YouTube natively and surfs the web much faster and it scales webpages for the small screen.
However, I think most would rather their kids were doing homework :) And for that, the Asus EeePC is perfect. But I'd honestly go all out for a current model netbook - they have faster processors, more storage, and larger screens nowadays, making them much more useful. But a 2G surf will be perfect if they just need something to type their homework on :) For more advanced needs, look elsewhere.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 299
Operating System: Linux
Processor: Intel Celeron
Processor speed: 501-600
RAM: More than 256
Hard Drive (GB): Under 4
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
americanbear
|
|
Member: Mark Uhde
Location: Montana, USA
Reviews written: 67
Trusted by: 12 members
About Me:
Thanks for reading my reviews! Learn more in my profile or at markuhde.com
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.