I’ve been following the ultrasub-notebook market very closely of late. Eee PCs (and MacBook Airs) have been selling like hotcakes, whilst other manufacturers have somewhat failed to penetrate the market.
However, I’ve just come across the HP Mini-Note. (True, that’s a rubbish name, but it’s better than “Eee PC”, or, worse still, “G-DIUM” - what were they on when they thought of that?) And, I have to say, it looks to be a very promising little machine.
Note: This is a copy of the present version of the article available at Jonathan Rothwell’s Brain Dump here. More up-to-date (or incorrect) information may be available there.
The Asus Eee PC is a fabulous little computer. However, it has one big Achilles’ heel: it only has 512mB of RAM by default on the lower-end models. This means that even applications such as Firefox, Evolution and OpenOffice.org can struggle. In most cases, RAM is more of a bottleneck than the CPU clock speed.
The Eee PC accepts up to 2gB of 200-pin SO-DIMM random access memory. (The Eee only uses a 32-bit CPU by default, and therefore can handle a theoretical maximum of 3gB of RAM, but as there’s only one RAM slot on the logic board, it can only handle 2gB without replacing the motherboard and CPU.)
I ordered my RAM from Crucial, who are, I have to say, excellent. The module arrived within sixty hours, along with an anti-static wrist strap. Their pricing is reasonable too.
I highly recommend the anti-static wrist strap. It’s a little strap with an adhesive side that you wrap around your wrist, and a copper tape on the end which is connected to ground. Normally, you’d connect it to the chassis of the computer: but as the Eee’s chassis is plastic, this will not do any good. Anything metal and exposed should work. I connected mine to the pipe of a radiator.
With regards to other tools, you should have access to a small-ish cross-headed (Phillips) screwdriver, and you should also have a large, clean-ish workspace, with access to a suitable grounding device and a spare thirty minutes or so, if you’ve never touched the inside of a machine before. If you have, it’ll probably take less than ten minutes. I swapped mine in less than a quarter of an hour, and the process would have been a lot quicker if I didn’t have to keep stopping to take photographs.
Upgrading the Eee PC’s RAM will most probably void the warranty. On some machines, an additional warranty sticker is stuck over the RAM access panel, so you would void the warranty by opening it. It’s no use coming round the other way either: all Eees have a warranty-void sticker on the spacer plate between the keyboard and the logic board. If you’re using the Eee 4G Surf (i.e. the 4gB disk drive but no webcam), you have no choice but to come down through the keyboard and trackpad, as there is no RAM access panel. On the 2G Surf, don’t bother: the RAM is soldered directly onto the logic board, so you’d have to replace the logic board as well as the RAM - and as the hard drive is soldered onto the motherboard, you’d need to replace that as well. Overall, it might be more economical for you to return the Eee and buy the next model up, if you are desperate for more RAM.
Even if you do not void the warranty, should your Eee fail and you want a refund from Asus, you would have to prove that the fault exists with the original hardware. This means restoring the original RAM module. If you intend on retaining the warranty’s validity, you’ll just have to put up with the RAM how it is.
I can take no responsibility for any damage that arises out of you following the instructions provided here. They are provided in good faith and are correct to the best of my knowledge, but they are provided as is and with absolutely no warranty whatsoever.
Right then… let’s go
This method comes in five parts: preparation, opening the case, installing the RAM, closing the case, and testing. This method should work for the Eee PC 701 4G, 8G, the 900 and the 901. I’m unsure about the 902 onwards, and the 1000 models. The 2G 701 has RAM that is impossible to replace, and the 4G Surf has no RAM access hatch. RAM can still be upgraded in the 4G Surf, but the ‘opening’ procedure should be modified to involve removing the keyboard, trackpad and top part of the case, and lifting the motherboard out of the case to access the RAM. Instructions for this can be found elsewhere on the Internet.
It’s worth grounding yourself again before doing this, just to be safe.
Place the RAM access hatch back where it was, and click it back into position. Replace the two screws, this time screwing clockwise to screw them in.
The Linux distribution that ships with the Eee PC has a kernel which is only compiled to handle 1024mB (1gB) of RAM, downwards. If you have a 2gB module and want to take full advantage of it, you will need to recompile the kernel. Instructions for this can be found elsewhere on the Internet.
Speaking of which, if you’re still using the default distro, why? It may be easier and cleaner for you to install Ubuntu Eee or Eeedora than to use the default, buggy, ugly, messy Xandros distribution.
I’ve just installed bits of Ubuntu Netbook Remix on Hammond (the Eee PC). And my God, is it beautiful. Just look at it! Look at it!
And look at what it looks like when a window is open! Look at it… it’s unbelievably slick!
Note how smoothly the window picker slips into the Firefox window! It’s stunning!
That said, it’s by no means perfect, yet. The installation process is rather messy at the moment, but by the time Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex appears (in October) it should be a painless process. At present, one has to
However, after that, everything appears in the shiny newness you see here. However, there are still a couple of rough edges:
What’s wrong here is that there’s nothing there to stop the icon labels if their text overflows into the space occupied by the icon immediately below. Here’s another caveat:
The problem here is that the scrollbar has badly misplaced itself - outside the box. However, this strangely manages to look artistic, somewhat like one of those silly installations at the Tate Modern.
What you see here is ume-launcher, Canonical’s answer to the default Asus Eee launcher. Personally, I think it beats the Eee launcher hands down.
There’s also the window picker applet at the top, which is specially designed for small screens, and maximus, somethig that maximises every window to make the best use of available screen space.
The reason it all looks so pretty is because of the new system it uses. It’s called Clutter, and uses OpenGL to render truly stunning user interface graphics. Somewhere on the Internet, there is a demo floating about of a GDM theme using Clutter - it looks simply stunning. The animations for ume-launcher are still a bit messy in some places, but my God are they beautiful.
It easily beats the Eee’s ugly default launcher, in my opinion. But there are still a few things I think wouldn’t go amiss in ume-launcher:
Other than these small gripes, I’m finding it difficult to fault, even at this early release. I suspect the final version that will appear with Intrepid will be even more shiny and wonderful.
If you’ll recall, a couple of days ago, I wrote about what I expected would appear at WWDC ‘08. As it transpires, it was a rather surprising event.
Overall, the Stevenote was something of a disappointment. It was interesting to see what they had to show us, but it concentrated heavily on the iPhone. This is very surprising.
The infamous iHype has been steadily growing in anticipation of Steve Jobs’s keynote on Monday at WWDC.
The Macworld offices are, evidently, very busy, with new rumours coming in left, right and centre. And this is not to mention the Apple rumour sites, whose editors must, judging by the number of rumours we’re seeing, be on forty caffiene tablets an hour.
Rumors include a tablet Mac, larger iPhones with 3G and GPS, 14-inch MacBooks with aluminium casing, and all manner of other goodies.
I have slightly different predictions:
I’ve blogged about AQA 63336 (leaving our site) before. This afternoon, I’ll be pitting it against 118 118’s new Ask Us Anything service (leaving our site). To ensure complete fairness, the question will be sent to both services at 1415 GMT today exactly.
Right… allons-y…
There’s no denying it. They’re everywhere. Those cheap and cheerful little notebooks that seem to small to physically exist are taking over the notebook computer market.
They’re cropping up everywhere. Apple’s young MacBook Air is, whilst expensive, still cheaper and smaller than most of the bigger subnotes out there. Asus’s Eee PC (who on EARTH thought of that name?) was the most wanted Christmas present stateside in 2007. I put in an order for my Eee PC earlier this week (the 4G webcam-enabled black model), and I’m expecting it to arrive sometime next week.
There are many other ultra-subs out there, but these two in particular (the MacBook Air and the Eee PC) have been selling like hotcakes. They are, by no means, full replacements for full-blown PCs; however, almost all seem to be targeted at the entry-level market. That is, at people who have no experience using computers.
Machines like the XO-1 are precursors to this market - they are designed to be easy to use, small, portable and drop-proof. The Intel Classmate PC, a similar computer, sprouted into the Asus Eee PC (pronounced E-PC). This little machine is tiny: it’s no bigger than two stacked DVD cases when closed. It also uses a solid-state disk drive, which more than compensates for its puny 900mHz Celeron processor (which, to rub sodium chloride into the proverbial wound, has been underclocked to 630mHz.)
However, the killer characteristic of the Eee is simple: it’s cheap. The cheapest model costs £199 in PC World, even if it is tucked away behind an aisle end-plate where you can’t see it. (Like the Macs, then: it’s hidden away where fewer people can see it.) Also, what bought it for me was that it ran Linux by default.
The Eee originally only came with a custom distribution of Xandros Linux on it, with IceWM as the window manager, and a tabbed menu interface replacing the desktop. Obviously it’s designed to mimic a mobile phone more than a conventional desktop, presumably to make it less intimidating to someone who’s never touched a computer before. A version with Windows XP is now available, and it can also be installed on the Linux Eee. The machine is capable of running just about any OS you can throw at it bar Vista, and some brave souls have even been able to maul that sufficiently to fit on the Eee’s miniscule 2-8gB solid-state hard drive.
Meanwhile, Apple had been working on its subnote for some time: the MacBook Air. It’s thinner than Victoria Beckham on a hunger strike and is far nippier than the Eee, although still not up to the standard of the MacBook Pro, or even the normal MacBooks which are long overdue a revision.
Like the Eee, it comes with a non-Windows OS by default. It comes preinstalled with Mac OS X, my own favourite Unix variant. It shares a lot in common with the Eee - no Windows, one-button trackpad, VGA webcam (available on the more expensive Eees) and no optical drive.
However, the Air being around five times more expensive than the Eee, there are many differences: it’s got a bigger screen and a full-sized keyboard, along with a multi-touch trackpad (which is in the pipeline on the Eee). There’s also a built-in system (using Bonjour) by which CDs and DVDs can be used with the Air without an external drive.
A major problem with the Air is its poor I/O. Its speaker is of the mono variety, and seems like something of an afterthought. It’s got no FireWire, and an irritating Micro-DVI port instead of the proper DVI port found on the MacBook Pro (and the mini-DVI port on the MacBook), no FireWire and only one USB2 port. No Ethernet. No PC Card.
Whilst the MacBook Air is an exquisite computer, it, like the Eee, fails to replace a full-blown computer. This isn’t surprising, and seems to have been misunderstood by the hordes of computer manufacturers now rushing to introduce kid-friendly ultra-subs. Indeed, these machines are more correctly ‘netbooks’, only properly designed for browsing the Internet on the go. That is my concern: that is a rather pointless category, better served by Internet tablets and PDAs. Heck, even the iPhone is better at browsing the Internet than some of these ‘netbooks’.
The manufacturers have somewhat missed the point, leaving AsusTEK and Apple to reap the rewards: Asus because it got there first, and Apple for its effective advertising and the halo effect from the iPod. Whilst the others have simply made a crippled subnote, Apple and Asus have made proper (if not full-featured) computers in a very small package.
With that in mind, you can expect a review of the Eee sometime next week.
As I’ve said before, I’ve switched my mobile provider from Tesco Mobile to 3, and bought a new phone in the process. It’s the 3 Skypephone. I shan’t review the network here: that is another tale for another day. I shall write about it next week. Now, I shall simply review the phone.
I bought it from a 3 store (in fact, a sublet of a branch of Superdrug). I was served by a very nice gentleman, who kindly reminded me that I needed to top up by £10 a month to keep the Skype minutes active, and was very helpful in serving me with the phone. He even gave me a penny’s extra change out of the two twenties and one ten pound note that I paid him with: he said he didn’t have a single penny. That was nice.
The phone’s packaging was very easy to open, and well-thought out. The phone itself is quite small, and is very nice-looking. It has a glossy finish, and also has quite tough casing.
I’m divided about the magnetic back cover. It’s easy to get off, but it doesn’t exactly lend itself to being sturdy. I haven’t had too much of a problem with it: it’s certainly given me less trouble than the Nokia 5200’s cover.
The pesky cover for the USB port soon came off (yay!) so that minor, and pointless, irritation has been removed. I noticed that as the USB port is in a recess in the bottom of the phone, it’s very unlikely that dirt will clog it up.
I’m a little concerned that the USB port is the only port on the machine. It means I can’t have the headset in while the phone’s charging, or while it’s connected as a USB mass storage device (although Bluetooth pretty much eliminates that need).
Niggles out of the way, I like the interface. It takes a lot of getting used to, but otherwise it’s quite good: it is very Sendo-esque. I like the fact that the Menu key is its own separate key.
The phone is also capable of multi-tasking. By pressing a button on the side, you can activate the task switcher. It can be activated by accident, but that’s only a minor inconvenience.
More annoying is the ‘click’ sound that the phone makes when its keys are pressed: it also makes this noise when the phone is locked, so if you bend down it can sound like there’s a Geiger counter going off in your pocket.
Also slightly pointless is the video-calling feature: whilst it does offer the facility, there is no forward-facing camera. This means either you can’t see your caller, they can’t see you, or you have to carry out the call in front of a mirror.
On the other hand, all the basic functions are there: call quality is good, text messaging is good, Skype is very clear, and WAP access over 3G is very fast. While the phone doesn’t support SkypeIn, SkypeOut or Skype Voicemail, and for some reason Google Maps cell tower triangulation doesn’t work (yet), the basic functions all work. And they all work well.
Don’t be deceived by the 2-megapixel camera. It’s rather rubbish in quality at 2MP, but it’s adequate enough for video calling.
I also dislike that the standby screen can’t be customised: you’re stuck with the keys for the Launcher and Planet 3. It’s not too big of an issue, but it’s something for future development.
Overall, the phone is quite good. It does get the feeling of being slightly unfinished, but I’m sure these will be sorted out with software updates. I highly recommend it as a general-purpose phone with plenty of functions: and at £49.99 (or £49.98 in my case) it is excellent value.
The Skypephone I bought last Friday is now fully working, the number has been transferred over. Trying to go through its functions now, while trying to get into my Nokia 5200 to destroy the old SIM card.
I’ve recently acquired a 3 Skypephone. I shall refrain from reviewing it until Friday, when my account gets credited and my number is transferred to the new network. In the meantime, suffice to say: it’s good.
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