Anyway

As inten­ded, I did take the Asus eee pc along on my trip to Maui last month. It was cer­tainly a lot lighter in the back­pack than the usual laptop. I even used it a bit (it has a fairly decent sudoku game on it). The wire­less con­nec­tion was a little flaky; I could some­times nom­in­ally con­nect to some wire­less net­work but no bits would actu­ally flow down the pipes. The error mes­sages were use­less, but then there often isn’t a lot to do when the wire­less doesn’t work. Even­tu­ally I found a net­work that did let me con­nect prop­erly, so I could check email and the odd web site.

If I were to use the Asus a lot, I’d need to fig­ure out a few dif­fer­ent applic­a­tions; for a few days while trav­el­ling or oth­er­wise not work­ing I can cope with check­ing feeds through browser-based applic­a­tions (after all, that’s how many people actu­ally do check feeds, if my log files are to be believed) and fun­nel­ling my per­sonal email through GMail, but even­tu­ally I’d want some­thing bet­ter. Learn­ing the key­board short­cuts does help, so maybe it would just be a mat­ter of get­ting used to those less-rich inter­faces. Or maybe they’d get more annoy­ing over time?

I’d also want to tweak beha­viour (move icons around in the tabbed win­dows), and add use­ful exten­sions. For example, I use the CoLT exten­sion on Fire­fox to copy the link and text, which is really handy on the small key­board. And I’d need to learn more usab­il­ity tips from sites such as the eee user forum, such as the one about mov­ing big dia­log boxes around by keep­ing the Alt key pressed while drag­ging from inside the win­dow, so you can get to the but­tons. I’d prob­ably want to tweak my blog’s stylesheet as well; in fact I’m think­ing about how to do that any­way, hav­ing seen what it looks like on the small screen.

The Asus may not quite be what Roger’s talk­ing about in his mani­festo for the walkaround-web tab­let, but it does fill a def­in­ite niche.

And I haven’t seen too many bugs, although I’ll close with the amus­ing pic­ture I snapped after leav­ing it in sus­pend mode for a while…