I've been looking for this a long time: a mobile device that I can carry with me all the time and that I can use to write. E-mails, blogs, stories, screenplays, notes, which means significant amounts of text. A laptop would be ideal, but is too heavy to carry around, just in case. A smart phone is too small to write more than a few lines in an e-mail. So I want something in between.
On New Years Day I stumbled over the Asus Eee PC, the "Surf" version, that is. This is a $299 ultra-portable that runs some version of Linux. It has almost no storage (some 300 MBytes are free), so it's more or less meant as a dumb Internet terminal. It's close to useless in that capacity, however: the WiFi client is ridiculous, forcing you to enter the WPA key every time it connects. It comes with Firefox, Skype and some other Internet apps, but the 7" screen doesn't make them fun to use. Firefox, for example, wastes almost half of the screen real estate with it's various tool and status bars. For a new class of device you need a new class of software - Asus is doing it on the cheap - literally - and the result sucks.
It can be a quite useful device nonetheless. It has the classic laptop form factor, with a real keyboard, a little smaller of course, but with a right look & feel. And I'm strongly convinced that ultra portable should have either a real keyboard or none at all. Nobody so far has figured how to do the latter right (guess we need to wait for Apple on this), so the Eee's conventional keyboard is the way to go. It also comes with OpenOffice installed, which contains a pro-grade word processor. Again, OpenOffice has its issues to fit in that small frame, but all in all it's usable for serious writing.
But how do I keep it in sync with my laptop? In theory, the Eee should connect to shared network drives, but while trying that I quickly ended up tweaking the Samba configuration files. Now I do know a thing about Linux configuration or two, but this isn't worth the effort. Fortunately there's an easier way: I use a SD card as primary storage on the Eee. With the help of ChronoSync on my MacBook it automatically syncs whenever I put it into the card reader. Sweet.
Remains the battery life, which is, as always, a bitter disappointment. The Eee gives you some 3 hours uptime, which is close to ridiculous, but apparently this is all you can get these days. My commute is around an hour each way, so I can live with that for now.
All in all I prefer the Eee much over other ultra portables, which I find far too expensive and lacking a real keyboard. But there's still an opportunity out there for the perfect mobile device that fits functionally a smartphone and a laptop.
