Quicklook is a series of small posts with first-view impressions on some things. I’m not going to post longish reviews but instead just several one line descriptions of what I noticed or stumbled upon. Sometimes with pictures.

Let’s get on.

• Device looks slick and sturdy. Feels pleasanly heavyish but not heavy.

• Boot up time is amazing - < 10 seconds from power on to working desktop. I had to make 3 tries to capture the eee logo screen.

• Interface is nice, bright and appealing.

• Keyboard has all the regular laptop keys. markings are english and chinese (looks funny, now i know how chinese keyboards look!)

• Quite web oriented.

• Has Skype 1.4.0.118 preinstalled.
• Applications are divided into nice categories, which help finding (or losing) the proper ones.
• Based on Xandros Desktop with ASUS modifications. Forked off of Debian Etch. i call it Xeeendros.
• Sound quality is very good.
• Camera is good even if only 0.3 Mpix. Webcam works in skype. The only tweak was to power it on: “echo 1 > /proc/acpi/asus/camera” (or enable in BIOS)
• Has a mix of KDE and Gtk software preinstalled. Many of kdeedu apps are there. Default mail client is Thunderbird, but KMail can be installed from debian repos and runs fine. Akregator runs fine also :P
• Device unfortunately misses bluetooth. A few solutions using USB or SD/MMC BT dongles are proposed, but would be better to have this integrated.
• Available connectors: 3 USB, 1 SD/MMC, RJ-45 lan connector, D-Sub video output.
• A nice helper application lets you set up output settings - to internal LCD only, to both internal and external and external only, and set resolution from autodetect up to 1280x1024.
• WiFi interface is very nice, shows all available networks, AP signal strength, remembers network keys between reboots.
• Battery lasts slightly over 3 hours - as specified.
• MPlayer video playback is very smooth.
• Touchpad became a bit stubborn after a few hours - I need to put my whole thumb on it to make it move. I personally would prefer clit - it’s nicer to use on such small device.
• “Voice command” didn’t work in the office, probably because it was too noisy. at home it recognised the commands but didn’t run anything :(
• Running startfull.sh from terminal window brings you into a full KDE session instead of iceWM-based AsusLauncher.
• Since it’s basically Debian you can install millions of available programs with ease (but beware: some packages may break your system because of wrong dependancies, read eee wiki to know more), yet small 4Gb solid-state disk with only 1,5Gb free doesn’t leave much choice.

Conclusion.

wow factor: high
overall rating: 95% qoolies