The battle of the small 7 inch laptops has begun. In one corner there is the Asus EEE, a fantastically well selling mini laptop that reviewers have gone gaga over.
The concept of the Asus is that it has a 900 Mhz processor, either a 2, 4 or 8 gig flash hard drive and a relative 256, 512 or 1 gig of memory. The small 7 inch screen is capable of a resolution of 800X480 pixels which is tight but usable on the small screen. The machine comes with a customised version of linux aimed towards simplicity and provides a wide array of software aimed more towards learning. Windows XP can also be installed on the machine making it a pretty useful device for someone tired of lugging round a large laptop or someone with a desktop as their primary machine. For most people the size of the internal hard drive might be a problem but there is an SD card slot so you can increase the size with a cheap, quick SD card. The laptop is incredibly versatile considering it weighs less than a kilo. In summary, I want one desperately!
As I mentioned earlier, in the other corner is the Everex Cloudbook. The Cloudbook is supposed to be the EEE killer in that it has a more powerful processor (1.2 Ghz) and a 30 gig hard drive to store much more information on. Again we see the 7 inch form factor with the same screen resolution. This is where the positives end and the problems begin. First of all it is slow. In comparison to the EEE, which takes 30 seconds to boot up, the Cloudbook takes about 3 minutes. This is due to the fact that the EEE uses faster flash memory while the Cloudbook uses a traditional hard drive which has moving parts and is thus slower. The next software related issue is that the Cloudbook uses a Linux distribution called gOS, which is highly integrated with Google Applications such as documents, calendar and others. This is not so great for South Africa where the kind of people buying a cheap laptop will not have permanent internet and for which the laptop might be slightly less useful. The touchpad is situated above the keyboard which is absolutely ridiculous.
While the price is exactly the same as the same as the EEE 4G ($400) version you need to wonder whether the extra space is worth the frustration of waiting as well as the inherently bad design of the machine? Since the Cloudbook is unlikely to be released in South Africa anytime soon (as of writing this the EEE was supposed to be released about 2 weeks ago) you’re technically stuck with the EEE. The question you need to ask is this a bad thing? In my opinion no it is not. The Cloudbook is a weak attempt to take the best parts of the EEE and add some killer features that end up ruining the image of a small and fast laptop that is user friendly at the same time.
The EEE is perfect, it isn’t the type of machine made to be your only computer and as such fulfills the role of a fast, portable laptop to work on when out of the house or office. Asus 1: Everex 0
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