ASUS X101-EU17-BK 10.1-Inch Netbook (Black)
ASUS X101-EU17-BK 10.1-Inch Netbook (Black)
- Intel Atom N435 (1.33GHz) / 8GB SSD / Meego OS
- 1GB DDR3 RAM / 0.69-Inch Thin /
- 0.3M Pixel Camera / 2 USB 2.0 Ports
- 1 Year Global Warranty / 6 Months Battery Warranty
10.1″ WSVGA (1024×600) / Intel Atom n435 (1.33GHz) / 1GB DDR3 RAM / 8GB SSD / Meego OS / 802.11BGN / 0.3M Pixel / 3 Cell Battery / 2 USB 2.0 Ports / MicroSD Reader / 1YR Global warranty / 6 Month Battery WarrantyThe Next Netbook Evolution
Today’s digital life is all about staying connected. The new Eee PC X101 is designed to do all that and more. The new Intel MeeGo Operating System on the X101 brings the internet to you in a new intuitive interface, integrating Facebook, Twitter an
List Price: $ 0.00
Price: $ 215.93
Inexpensive, lightweight connectivity with a keyboard.,
Netbooks fill two needs for me. First, I need to access the Internet when I am on the move. Most of the information I need to make a living is somewhere in the cloud and for all practical purposes my browser is my business desktop. I do, however, need to write as well as read. I am writing this on the X101 in Google docs. A tablet doesn’t work for me; I must have a keyboard.
I also have to write when I am not connected to the Internet–something that happens to me fairly often. That means I also need a word processor.
To keep me connected and writing, or just writing when not connected, I want a throw-away machine that boots up and shuts down quickly. By a throw-away, I mean something I can ruin by leaving it out in the rain without feeling that I have suffered a significant financial loss. The quick boot is so that I don’t have to leave the thing in sleep mode all day to avoid the pain of restarting it. I don’t need a lot of computing power or storage. I don’t use power hungry applications or keep information I care about on netbooks.
After a weekend with the Asus X101 with Meego, I have the following observations.
Internet: Everything is fine here. The Chromium browser works well and the screen is bright. Videos, images, pdfs, and other files display easily. The wi-fi connects painlessly.
Word Processor and Office Applications: The Asus X101 comes with OpenOffice and a very basic text editor. I use OpenOffice in my physical office and like it in that context. OpenOffice, however, is big and acts a bit clunky on the X101. It opens slowly and at times the low powered X101 struggles with it. Something like Jarte–a little more sophisticated than a simple text editor, but less than a full office suite–needs to show up on the Asus application site.
Keyboard: It has a chiclet keyboard which is not as comfortable as a full sized keyboard, but it isn’t bad. I have hands that can palm a basketball, yet I was up to full speed typing after an hour or so of getting the feel of it. One thing I like is that the touchpad is easy to turn off so you don’t accidentally hit it when typing.
Meego: The Meego operating system boots up in about fifteen seconds. This is better than windows on a low powered machine, but not great. It shuts down almost instantly. I found configuring and then navigating Meego a bit confusing at first, but I eventually got a desktop that works for me. I can now navigate multiple applications without having to think too much about the operating system. That is good.
Meego Applications: There is a Meego App Store that comes with the computer,but the shelves are almost empty. I didn’t see anything I wanted, but, other than a middle of the road word processor, there isn’t a lot I need that isn’t included.
Battery Life and Weight: Batteries are heavy and this thing is not. It is very thin and light. You pay for it in battery life. I have gotten between three and four hours out of a charge, a fairly short time compared to heavier Asus netbooks, but not bad compared to many full size notebooks. It has a reasonably small plug, and no unwieldy power brick.
I have only had the X101 a few days, but I consider it a keeper. It does a few things well and those happen to be things that I need done. I am over searching for the one machine that does everything. The X101 provides cheap lightweight connectivity, a workable keyboard, and some basic stand alone applications. If you need a lot more than that, I would look elsewhere.
Was this review helpful to you?
|Set your expectations right,
I did extensive research on tablets and netbook computers before settling on this little gem. I believe this computer can make two types of customers happy:
1) Those with very specific uses in mind (and are willing to adapt to using a computer with obvious limitations). In my case it’s web browsing (mostly reading and searching) and reading PDFs (supplementing my Kindle reader).
2) Those who are not afraid or even happy to do a little Linux hacking.
If you happen to be both then chances are that you will be a fairly happy customer, esp. considering how little you pay to get it.
What are the deal-clinchers for me? It’s the lightest of the netbooks at two pounds. The time for booting up or waking up is very short, which significantly enhances the user experience. And you don’t have to pay for a watered down version of MS Windows.
Because this computer is Linux based I am fairly confident that I can work around most of the problems that come with a not yet well-polished GUI. Remember that Meego is just the user interface package while the underlying operating system is industrial strength.
Some tips that came from playing with this thing:
0) Liberally use ctrl + to increase font sizes. You will find a much more eye pleasing reading experience at a better font size.
1) PDF viewing: because of the small screen size you definitely want to use the full screen mode. But in full screen mode you don’t have access to pull down menus so you would want to remember a few shortcut key combinations, esp for zooming (hint: ctrl-1, 2, 3 till you get what you want). You should also play with the Reader’s preference settings for full screen viewing.
2) Definitely learn to use shortcut keys to get around the fact that this is not a touchscreen tablet. alt-tab is a lot easier to use to switch among app windows than the silly Meego toolbar “zones”. Chrome shortcut keys are good to know. One caveat: the mapping for alt-arrows has a conflict with Chrome. Alt-left sends you to the virtual terminal first before getting you to the previous page in the browser. This is a well-known conflict for Linux so it seems that the packagers at Meego dropped the ball here. I worked around this by doing “sudo kbd_mode -s” in the terminal to switch the keyboard to raw mode instead of UTF-8.
3) Learn to use the terminal (applications->system tools->). An introductory book or website on Linux definitely helps here. In theory this gives you complete control over your computer. Let’s face it GUI (even in MS Windows or Apple MAC OS) could never give you the same control. For example you can use rpm (the package manager) to find out about every single package installed on your computer — and I am pleasantly surprised that the installed packages are fairly rich. The standard “man” works well too, allowing you to look up command syntax easily.
4) Same as another reviewer my Chrome browser has trouble defaulting the Google search engine setting (mine was set to google dot com dot tw). This is a Chrome issue that affects not just Meego but I do need to fix it. So in the terminal I edited my ~/.config/chromium/Local State file (using vi) after closing all browser windows (do “ps -A |grep chrom” to make sure). The change needed is to edit the last_known_google_url and last_prompted_google_url variables in that file to set the right country code suffix (none for the US). Note the file browser does not appear to show the special files (beginning with ‘.’).
5) Rebooting is fast and painless (in the terminal do “sudo reboot”) so in case your computer gets sluggish or otherwise misbehaves don’t be afraid to give it a reboot. Reboot is really fast, not your standard Windows experience, and certain changes (such as to the date/clock settings) appear to only take effect after a reboot.
I hope that I’ve given you a taste of how you can deal with software issues.
The computer does run kind of hot on the bottom side (the User Manual I downloaded before the purchase warned about it but it is still hotter than I expected). It is not so hot that you can’t put it on your lap but it is hot enough that you want something between it and your skin to stay comfortable. This is mostly an issue with Intel processors — they run surprisingly hot even with SSD. I look forward to buying ARM based netbooks one day.
Touchpad does not yet support pinch zoom which is disappointing (NOTE: horizontal scrolling can be turned on through Settings). Hopefully these will be supported with future updates.
Battery life is a bit of wanting (I would say less than the advertised 4 hours with any real serious usage) but it does recharge fast.
Was this review helpful to you?
|does everything I need it to,
I bought this because it is tiny and light. The 10″ screen does take a little getting used to coming from a 13.3″ laptop.
The keys are small, but I have small hands. I found it easy to adapt to the keyboard and was able to touch type as well as I do on other keyboards in short order.
It takes a looooong time for the USB recovery disk to get created. I plugged a brand new 16GB drive into the USB port and told it to make the recovery disk. It took about 40 minutes for that process to finish. That is a whole lot longer than I expected it to take. There is no status indicator to tell you how much progress is being made which leads you to wonder how it is going.
The interface takes a little getting used to with its “zones”. But it was easy enough to set up the wireless internet connection. I use Chrome already so the browser was no problem to adapt to. The Facebook and Twitter page that is on the main page is kind of silly. It is basically the same as the mobile FB feed. I find it much less useful to look at than the regular FB experience. I wish there was a way to get rid of the Twitter thing because I don’t use it.
I got a 16GB microSD card for a little bit of added storage because it was fairly cheap. But I am not sure how much space I will really need. I do travel a good deal to parts of the world without reliable internet connections though so it will be nice to be able to write basic docs offline.
I am quite pleased to see that there is a basic photo viewer and editor built-in. That was something I was wondering about. I shoot a lot of pictures when I travel. A quick test showed that it was easy to move files from an SD card reader to my portable Iomega HDD through the netbook to back them up. It was easy plug and play just as USB should be.
The Vibe media software is buggy. I tried connecting several times to a radio station from their list. It would play for half a second and then crash. So that thing was not ready for prime time.
The app store is very sparse. I tried to download and install the the note app but it refused to install.
It gets very HOT on the bottom. There does not appear to be any sort of active cooling.
I plan to upgrade the memory to 2GB. A memory module for this thing is less than $15.
On the whole I have to say I am quite pleased. I don’t plan to use this as a main computer or anything, but will use it when I travel. That’s why I wanted the thinnest and lightest machine I could find. It does everything I need and then some.
**************
UPDATE
I may have spoken too soon. I made the mistake of syncing all of my Google info and that seems to have completely done in the Chromium browser. After many tries I finally got the USB restore to work. So hopefully I can set things back to a working state. But I will definitely not sync my google account to this thing
Was this review helpful to you?
|