Asus Eee PC 901

After quite a bit of thought and a lot of reading on the net I decided that I "needed" a netbook. I did leave buying a little while to ensure it wasn't just an impulse buy and OK it's no really a necessity but I just kept noticing occasions when one would have been useful.

Any netbook is a combination of compromises. You simply can't have portability without sacrificing other elements like screen size, keyboard size, storage and the like. It's just a matter of deciding which elements are the most important to you. In my case it was portability and battery life which were top of the list. I decided that I could live with a small screen and small keyboard in order to get a machine I could actually use on my train home (with the tiny seat back table) and carry around the house. In the end I settled on the Asus Eee PC 901. Had I been a touch typist (I'm a reasonably fast "hunt and peck") I would probably have plumped for an Acer Aspire One or one of the 10 inch machines. The keyboard can't be too bad as I'm typing this post on it!

I thought the 7 inch machines would be very irritating having to scroll side to side on many web pages so the 9 inch seemed a better option. Whilst the 10 inch machine has a larger screen (obviously!) the resolution is apparently the same as the 9 inch.

My regular train journey is 1.5 hours in each direction and so I didn't want to have to charge the machine up between journeys as I'd have to carry the power brick with me (although the Eee PC brick is pretty small and light). Most of the contenders seemed to have pretty short battery life without resorting to optional larger batteries (it does defeat the otherwise attractive lower price of the Acer Aspire One for example) and the six cell battery coming with the 901 avoids this problem.

I decided I didn't need a Windows machine and the additional storage on the Linux model (20Gb) was attractive so that's the one I decided on.

It will take a little while for me to properly assess the machine but I've been pleasantly surprised so far with only a couple of small issues.