Last winter I bought a eee laptop from Asus - an inexpensive Linux laptop with a great looking screen, pretty quick boot times (around 15 seconds as I recall) and decent wireless connectivity. I had bought it hoping that it would be the convergence box that would do let me play MP3's, view digital photo's, listen to BBC radio while I had breakfast, keep notes on a real computer, play poker at a coffee shop and maybe use Skype. It failed to be all of that because the boot times were too long and I couldn't connect seamlessly as I wandered about Terrace. It's close to being what I want but I'm holding out for the device that I know is coming. Asus have a new PC which is primarily geared towards net surfing that uses a faster booting version of Linux called Splashtop - down to around 5 seconds on the right hardware (coming from Flash ROM) and I suspect that number could be significantly less if somebody simply put it in ROM so there was no data transfer at startup. But 5 seconds is a lot better than 15 when you are talking about a consumer device and I suspect they can get that down further again. If the next eee notebook runs Splashtop and holds my wireless connections better (dare I hope for seamless roving wireless?) then I will be giving Asus cash again. In the interim Alaric has bought the old eee from me and has been pretty much attached by the hip to the device for the last 6 months - he often gives us weather updates from the living room and we went down to the beach earlier this summer to look at heirloom seeds on the internet. It's a nice little device with a great screen.
Here's a link to a
review of the new eee "net-top" box. It's a bit underpowered for everyday computing but sounds like a good surfing experience. And in a very commendable move it sips 18 watts an hour as compared to the 200-400 watts most home computers consume (YMMV depending upon things like video card and CPU).
Tomorrow AM we will all be piling into the van for our trip back to Terrace. It's been a great summer at the lake and I got a ton done on Big$hot. I'm expecting to do a press release very soon and will probably have an alpha version for portal and press folks at that time. A beta copy for public consumption should follow a few weeks after, early September time frame.
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