Today I attended a presentation at Pepcom in the Hammerstein Ballroom in NYC. A fascinating place and I suggest you follow the Wikipedia link to get a bit of history about the ballroom.
Most of the stuff wasn’t too interesting, but Asus was showing the Eee PC. I got there early and was the first at the table. Unfortunately there was an Internet problem when I took these pictures and I couldn’t get the text shots I wanted, but when I went back to get some more, after the Internet connection was fixed, the table was mobbed and I couldn’t get near it for the rest of the evening.
The picture above shows the unit with my keys next to it to give some sense of scale. Even with the keys, the machine is much smaller than it looks in the picture. I got the definite feeling that the Asus folks were astounded at the Eee’s popularity.
Click on any of the pictures in this post for a full-size version so that you can get the details.
The Asus representative said that the units are selling so fast that none of the company’s retailers in the U.S. can keep them in stock. I asked her about e-book software (this is the linux version we were talking about) and she said that there is nothing planned by Asus other than the built in PDF reader. I had a few minutes to play with the machine before the mob descended, and it is very impressive.
Typing will be a bit of a problem as the keyboard is really, really small. The unit is fast and responsive and the trackpad is very easy to use. For e-books, the screen is nice and bright and I was surprised at how sharp it was. I think I could read a book on this, but the form factor would be a problem for me. After getting used to an e-ink display the back lit display of a laptop or PDA has become annoying for e-book reading. However, the unit is so small and light that I could easily see lying in bed with it on my chest or holding it in my hands. Here are a couple of closeup shots of the screen:
Here you can see that the colors come out pretty well. Notice the shadow under the Google logo. It gives a feeling for the crispness of the display. This shot was taken with a flash and a translucent diffuser to simulate a front light screen.
Here is some more text. It is clear and crisp and easy to read. The reason for the black rectangle is that I didn’t use a flash for this shot so the silver bezel wasn’t illuminated. This gives a good feel for the internal back lighting of the unit.
The Eee definitely has FBReader installed. However, the only file in the “My Documents/My Ebooks” folder is manual.CHM. At a minimum, it needs a .html page on where to find (legal) free e-books.
>>>After getting used to an e-ink display the back lit display of a laptop or PDA has become annoying for e-book reading.
Wow. That’s the first time I’ve heard of that. I never even considered that side-effect!