Anyway

I got an Asus to take on hol­i­day (vaca­tion) with me, and to play around with. They’re cute and small and way easi­er to lug around than a laptop. With the small screen doing ser­i­ous work is more dif­fi­cult (a plus when you’re not meant to be work­ing) but I can still check email and web sites and maybe even catch up on some blogging.

I got the 4G ver­sion, and had the RAM increased to 2 GB in the shop so the war­ranty is still val­id. Just in case. Not to men­tion which, it cost all of $15 and 5 minutes for them to do it, and it would prob­ably have taken me longer to find the right screwdriver.

First impres­sions: it’s cute. The “easy desktop” is mostly use­ful, and the selec­tion of applic­a­tions reas­on­able (Fire­fox, Thun­der­bird, Skype, Open Office, Pidgin). I’m try­ing to restrain my inner geek and see how much I can get done with the easy desktop before I revert to type and install the full desktop. Some things don’t change though; one of the first things I did was find where to update soft­ware (add/remove pan­el) and update everything. You get this weird mes­sage for some applic­a­tions, such as Skype, say­ing that you can remove the pack­age after updat­ing, without say­ing wheth­er that’s just to clean up the pack­age remains after they’ve been installed, or wheth­er it really does remove the whole thing. Giv­en you can­’t remove (most of?) the default soft­ware, I’m assum­ing it would actu­ally unin­stall those applic­a­tions that can be removed; maybe when I have time to do the delete/reinstall cycle I’ll try out that assumption.

I’m not sure how far I can get without installing and con­fig­ur­ing some extra stuff. Some of the instruc­tions and scripts the on Abso­lute Begin­ners Wiki look use­ful so I’ll prob­ably break down and try them out. Part of the reas­on for restrain­ing myself on this is curi­os­ity — what does a Taiwanese com­pany think that “house­wives, office ladies and stu­dents” need in a mobile inter­net device? Part is also to fig­ure out wheth­er I can recom­mend this sort of device to non-tech­nic­al people I know, or wheth­er I’ll also have to tell them to do X, Y, and Z to make it usable.

More later, after I’ve played with it a bit more.