john.layt.net

Today my birthday AND Christmas came early with not one but two new toys arriving in the mailbox, which has left me a very happy little geek boy.
The first is a new lens for my Pentax K10D DSLR, a Tamron 18-250 super zoom to use as a walk-around / travel lens. I've been putting up with the kit 17-55mm lens for too long and finally had to splash out to extend my range. With the 1.5 times multiplier effect, that's equivalent to 27-375mm, so no excuses now for not getting those close-up details I like.
The second is that eigth wonder of the technology age, the ASUS Eee. For those who haven't heard of it before, it's a sub-notebook with a 7 inch
screen, 900Mhz Celeron CPU, 4Gb flash drive in place of the usual hard drive, 512Mb RAM,
wireless, and no CD drive. It weighs less than 1kg, and only costs
£220. You can see what it looks like in my gallery. Actually, "sub" doesn't do this little beauty justice, try sub-ultra-nano-micro-pico-femto-notebook for size. I knew it was small, but I was still shocked when I opened the box to see just how tiny it is. It was a real geek-magnet at work when it arrived, even the hardware guys who are currently trialling all the cool new tablets.
Some random notes:

• I got the black model which has a textured matt finish similar to a Thinkpad, but my sweaty fingers still leave faint marks.
• The power adaptor is little larger than a mobile phone one, and has a changable travel adaptor head, a nice small touch.
• The hinges are very sturdy, far better than my old Dell
• It boots in aboout 15 seconds
• Everything Just Works
• OpenOffice starts faster than I expected, only 10 seconds, but I still want KOffice
• The 4Gb flash drive is partitioned into a 2.3Gb read-only system partion and a 1.4Gb read-write data partition, and uses unionfs for 'updates' to the system. This means all the drive-based restore function has to do is wipe the second partition, which could be convenient if you have to support hundreds of these in a school environment.
• There's no Linux restore CD, instead you run the driver CD under Windows which sets up a USB memory stick as the restore media.
• A single USB port outputs enough power to run my external drive, unlike my Dell that needs 2 ports.
• The 800x480 screen is OK, but a higher resolution would be better as some things don't quite fit. It has a slight white light leak at the bottom, but no dead pixels.
• The keyboard is small, and my fingers are fat, but 1 finger typing is fine, and with a little practise I should be able to fit a couple more fingers in there. The feel is actually firmer and less wobbly than my Dell.
• The touchpad is tiny, and appears to randomly forget its sensitivity setting. I'll think I'll get a bluetooth mouse.
• The webcam does a reasonable job, I'l upgrade Skype to the video beta to see how well that works.
• There's an unused modem socket, perhaps in the fabled 8Gb version?
• It has a Voice Command feature, for example saying "Computer Web" launches Firefox. Well, it should but it doesn't cope with my Kiwi accent. The perfectly plummy public school accent of the guy next to me at work has no such problems...
• There's an online BIOS update facility.
• It comes with Anti-Virus installed.
• The default kernel is only compiled to support 1Gb of RAM, but the slot will take 2Gb.
• The tabbed interface is very well executed, and does a good job for its target audiance, but it's not for me long term :-)

I'll play with the default Xandros install for a few days, but as soon as I can I'll be wiping it to install another distro and see just how well KDE4 copes with such a low screen resolution screen. I'll also then be able to crack the case and upgrade to 2Gb RAM.
Now, I'm suddenly tempted to get a 3G Bluetooth phone and a data plan so I have internet anywhere I go.