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Quick follow up to my post about the EeePC 1000 the other day. I had used the 901 for about a month and now the 1000 for a few days. What a difference an inch makes!

The keyboard is extremely pleasant to work with. It’s not 100% size but it’s definitely big enough for me to type blind (and fast). And it doesn’t have the annoying “smaller keys” that you have on a 901. Especially bad are the “;” and “'” keys that are about a third narrower than the other keys on the 901 keyboard. This caused me to hit “return” a lot when I actually wanted to type an “'“. Very annoying, especially in chat sessions.

The larger screen is fine, the resolution and DPI are acceptable (hey, there are compromises to be made here). The bigger flash (40GB SSD vs. 12GB or 20GB, depending on the 901 model that you get) is really great to have – it hasn’t been that long that this was an acceptable size for a disk in a laptop. Battery life is decent. With F9 (which isn’t really optimized all that well for power) I get about four to five hours.

One drawback is that the 1000 is no longer a sub-one-kilogram computer. It’s about 1300g. But frankly, the keyboard alone is worth it. So if you are looking for the smallest and lightest you can get, the 901 is it. But if you are looking for a really useful and still affordable second portable system (for example if you want a native Linux system in addition to your Mac) – the 1000 might be the better choice.

After using the EeePC 701 for a while I realized that the screen was simply too small to be useful. I switched to the EeePC 901 and thought that the screen resolution was a huge improvement.

But after a couple of months with that, I realized that as a real day-to-day system the keyboard simply was too small for my fingers. So as of today I have an EeePC 1000. And I love it.

40GB of SSD (8GB sda and 32GB sdb). 1GB memory (already upgraded to 2GB). Bluetooth, Wireless (b/g/n). 10″ screen with 1024×600 resolution (hey Asus, how about a higher resolution LCD? just dreaming…). And most importantly a 92% keyboard.

I have a relatively standard Fedora 9 running on it and am extremely happy with that.

Well, except for the boot time – I am writing this post sitting in Arjan’s “boot in 5 second” talk at Linux Plumbers Conference and would really like to see some of these changes in my F9 setup… I’ll have to talk to him about that afterwards.

I finally found a site that compares (among others) the EeePC 900 and 901 in a couple of benchmarks. OCW compares an ECS 945GCT-D motherboard with an Atom processor at 1.6GHz with an MSI Wind running XP (and both of these have a hard drive) to the two EeePCs. Given the mixture of Vista and XP and HDD and SSD I think that the numbers for EeePC 900 vs EeePC 901 are the most interesting.

The Atom-based 901 wins almost all of the benchmarks – higher memory bandwidth (between +15% and +38%). Higher integer and floating point performance (Whetstone and Dhrystone both show around 50% improvement) and even more significantly between 2x and 3.5x the performance in some multimedia benchmarks.

Interestingly enough the 900 is actually faster in the Super PI 1M benchmark – I’m very curious to find out why.

What is missing is battery life – other tests that I’ve seen grant the 901 between 1.5x and 2x the battery life of the 900. Overall, very nice!

Finally, the Atom processor based netbooks are starting to ship in the US. So far I’ve had a chance to play with two of them, the Acer Aspire One and the Asus EeePC 901 (I also own an EeePC 701 and have spent some time with an EeePC 900 which is somewhere in between the 701 and the 901. It’s Celeron processor based like the 701 but has the larger screen and larger SSD of the 901).

I see quite some excitement about the Acer – people like the way it looks, like that it’s so light, like the bigger keyboard. After a few hours with it, I decided to return mine and go with an EeePC 901 instead. Here’s why.

First, let’s talk basics. The price for being so light is that the battery is minuscule. About a third of the capacity of the battery of the EeePC 901. And given that the actual electronics inside are very similar, I’d venture a guess that this will bring significantly shorter battery life as well.

The price for the larger keyboard is bigger footprint (I might be willing to live with that) and a much smaller touchpad with the buttons on the side instead of below the touchpad. That alone would be a deal breaker for me. The ergonomics of this are really bad – I always had to remember to look for the buttons in the wrong place, the touchpad is so small that I often couldn’t move the mouse across the screen without lifting my finger. But it gets much worse. The touchpad also doesn’t support the multi-touch gestures that the EeePC 901 supports. To me this is one of the great often overlooked improvements of the 901 compared to the 701; you can scroll using two fingers on the touchpad – just like on a Mac.

Then there are a few feature differences. 8GB of built-in SSD vs 20GB in the Linux-based EeePC 901. Huge difference. And while the second SD card slot on the Acer tries to make up for it, the SD cards aren’t flush with the case when inserted which is really bad for transporting the computer. And of course access to an SD card is slower than access to the built-in SSD. Also, the Aspire One is lacking Bluetooth which the EeePC 901 has built in.

What pushed me over the edge was my attempt to add more memory to the Acer. On the Asus you remove two screws, pop in a new SO-DIMM, you’re done. On the Acer you remove 14(!!) screws, remove the keyboard connector cable, the touchpad connector cable, remove the keyboard, the top cover, a bunch more screws and then the whole motherboard assembly; and then add the SO-DIMM. You are kidding, right? I realize this is not something that you do every day (or more than once, for that matter). But to me it simply shows that Acer didn’t think this one through.

Finally, the OS. Yes, the Linupus Linux desktop looks pretty at first, but frankly I don’t see any real improvement to the Xandros desktop. It’s just different. And somethings seem much harder to me. I couldn’t get the Network Connection Manager to log me into any wireless networks. It’s really hard to get a terminal window (you have to open the file browser and then you can start a terminal from the File menu – not exactly intuitive, compared to Ctrl-Alt-T on the EeePC). But I’ll admit that this wouldn’t really be a deal breaker – I’ll switch over to a Fedora 9 install right away.

I’ll get my own EeePC 901 on Monday (so far I’ve only played with one that belongs to a coworker of mine for a while). I’ll post more impressions then.

Lots of new ultralight notebooks are being announced these days – I’m already at a loss trying to keep track of all the little machines entering the market (or at least being announced – very few seem to actually be shipping). But I’ll admit that this one sparked my interest: the 3K Longitude 400 uses (and I quote) a “Low Power Consumption Ingenic 400MHz 32-Bit Single Core CPU”.

What’s most interesting about this (besides the fact that Ingenic seems to be the International Group for Genetic Improvement of Cocoa – but a little more googling gets you to Ingenic Semiconductor) is that this appears to be the first laptop design based on this CPU. The information on Ingenic’s site is rather sparse. It appears that the CPU was originally only designed to run at up to 360MHz, that it’s based on a 180nm process (the Intel Atom processor, for comparison, is built on a 45nm process) and (based on the data sheet claim of <0.5mW/MHz) it should consume only about 0.2W. It’s a MIPS derivative which means it doesn’t run x86 software like more or less every other laptop out there, which will make comparing the 3K Longitude 400 to other contenders pretty hard; I’ll try to find some benchmarks but am not optimistic.

Everything else seems fairly low-end / standard: 512MB of RAM, 4GB of flash, 7″ 800×480 display (bad), 3 USB ports, wired and wireless Ethernet, Linux pre-installed, estimated price of USD 400. Given all that, I cannot see why someone would prefer this over the original (i.e., the EeePC 701).

While doing some googling I ran across this auction/buy-it-now item on Ebay. A New ASUS EeePC Eee PC900 20G/1G RAM 8.9″<1KG Laptop for USD 650 + USD 60 for shipment to the US. No indication how quickly it would arrive, but likely this will be the fastest way to get your hands on one.

Still, I think I’ll pass.

TrustedReviews has another EeePC 900 review. This is maybe the most positive review that I’ve seen so far; the only thing they criticize is battery life, and that’s where the Atom-based successor will certainly provide a major improvement.

One little gem that I found in the review and hadn’t seen before: instead of the “right edge scroll” on the touchpad of the EeePC 701, the new model uses Mac style multi-touch scrolling. Simply put two fingers on your touchpad and move them vertically or horizontally and you are scrolling instead of moving the mouse pointer. Apparently the display even supports iPhone style zooming motions – sweet.

Given that Gartner expects 293 million PCs to be shipped this year one has to be impressed with Asustek’s expectations for the success of the EeePC. According to DigiTimes, Asus has ordered 2.5-3 million Atom processors from Intel – and the Atom based EeePCs won’t start shipping for another couple of months, so if you add the about 2 million Celeron M based EeePC 701 and EeePC 900 that they will ship on top of their Atom based units, one can extrapolate that they expect that the EeePC series will account for more than 1.5% of all PCs shipped this year. That’s quite impressive!

Add to that the roughly 2 million Intel Atom and Via C7-M processors ordered for this year by the other major competitors in the Netbook space, then you can see that these tiny computers are becoming a significant part of the market, fast. A year ago they sounded like toys and not something that the market was ready for (except for OLPC’s XO which claimed that the market was ready for it, only it wasn’t ready for the market).

The folks over at VR-Zone got their hands on production EeePCs (I still have not been able to get ahold of one – life’s unfair). They have tons of details comparing the different EeePC versions.

The pictures show that I was right that the EeePC 900 has a slightly larger body than the EeePC 701. And most of the other data had been known before, but still, it’s a great summary and confirmation of all the details.

Their overall conclusion is extremely positive. Bigger screen, bigger SSD, bigger touchpad, more memory, CPU clocked higher by default, higher resolution webcam… what’s not to like!

Today I was thrilled to see that a couple of Oregon schools have started to roll out EeePCs for their students. What a great way to get computers in the hands of children. Affordable, useful, and not based on Windows.

I hope this program is successful and gets deployed more broadly. Computers help kids learn – and everyone needs to learn how to use a computer.

Excellent!