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…
