Community Matters

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.