Asus Eee PC: A real computer for the frugal e-book fan on the go

My eBookwise is a talented one-trick pony, but I wanted to do more than read. And yet I didn’t want to lug around a fragile, hefty notebook PC or spend big money on a subnotebook. Then I read of the Asus Eee PC, priced for an impulse buy even though it was a long way from a true $100 laptop. About time!

The $350 I paid for my shiny new 4GB Eee, just $50 more than the 2GB Surf model, was well worth it to me.

I had some fairly typical newbie issues while getting the EEE set up. But now that I’m getting more comfortable with its features and how to customize them, I am in love.

Setting up the Eee: Good to go, right out of the box

The EEE was ready to use out of the box. When I turned it on, I saw a window with tabs—work, play, Internet, settings and favorites. Each tab comes pre-set with large buttons. Click, and launch, it was that simple. I already knew most of these applications because the machine is built on an open-source Linux platform, and I had seen some of these programs on other devices: OpenOffice, FBReader, Tux Paint and a few of the games played exactly as on my Mac. I was up and running at once.

The tabs can be customized—to a point. Anything that’s already on there can be added to the favorites tab, but any major tweaking will involve mucking around with the Linux “terminal.” I keep hearing how flexible and customizable the Linux system is, and that may be true for advanced functions. But for the average user who is used to dragging an icon onto a taskbar—and voila, shortcut—putting path names into a “simpleui.rc” file from within the scary terminal mode will be a challenge. Is there really not an easier way? Of course there is. Just not in Linux! With that said, if you are happy with the setup that the Eee gives you, and you don’t want to add anything new, you really can be up and running in about two minutes.

Using the Eee: A snap on the whole, with Acrobat and FBReader included

The keyboard took a little getting used to because of its tiny size; I kept hitting the S when I meant A. I spent about half an hour playing with the included Tux Typing arcade game and it got me much more comfortable with the keyboard layout.

Included e-book readers were Acrobat and FBReader. Once again, the Internet came to my rescue here. On first glance, I was ready to write off FBReader because it would only advance one line at a time. A previous TeleBlog article had just the answer I needed—again, it was not the most intuitive way the job could have gotten done, and I would not have thought of it on my own, but once I had my solution, I was reading a Project Gutenberg download in no time. I do think the paragraphs look a little nicer on my eBookwise; it seems the line breaks between paragraphs did not show up in FBReader, although that might have been the fault of the formatting on the individual books I tested.

Reading from the Eee: FBReader up close

The FBReader program can handle more than one format without conversion, unlike the previous platforms (Palmdoc, Rocketbook) I’ve used. The FBReader homepage says FBR aims to cover as many popular formats as they can, but it does stay away from some popular-but-proprietary filetypes like Kindle and Microsoft Word. Additionally, the program can’t handle any sort of DRM, so if I wanted to read the protected Mobipocket books our library has, I am 3 for 3 on mobile devices I own but cannot use. Still think the DRM and eBabel outcry is being blown out of proportion?

The screen itself, to its credit, is very customizable. You can change the font type and size (and I mean really change it—not just “small, medium, large” as on the Alphasmart Dana’s pre-installed eReader) and use the advanced settings to change margins and line spacing. The interface does haves some quirks though. I wasted a few minutes trying to find an “open” command so I could launch a book. It turns out the only way to do that is to add it to your “library” and then access it from your “bookshelf.” That’s fine if it’s something you plan to keep around for awhile, but if you just want to have a quick look, it’s a little labor intensive. Why not just let me open and close?

Acrobat was a bit more cumbersome. Unlike FBReader, it does not “repaginate” for font size or screen size. A page is a page is a page. So on a smaller device like this one, you’ll have to do a lot of scrolling to get any reading done. I also ran into some problems when I tried to remove the Asian language pack to conserve system resources. It was a bit of a mess to clean up, and to my further annoyance, I learned that this is a known bug on the EEE and trying to remove this language pack is a well-known Number One Bad Idea. It’s fixable, as I said, if you’re patient, proficient with Google, and have at least a limited sense of adventure as far as playing with your techie toys goes—but I cannot imagine someone like my mother doing any of this stuff, and had it been her, the tale would have ended with a tearful phone call to me and a return to the store for a refund.

Teaching with the Eee: E-books for the kids

The K-12 e-book market is an under-developed one, but as a teacher, it’s an area that interests me. I often use songs and lyrics with the classes I teach, and I was interested in playing with some of them on the Eee. Many of the classic kiddy French songs are old enough to be in the public domain and freely available on-line for tweaking. I have some colleagues who have been doing interesting things with music and poetry in Powerpoint. There’s one my littlest students love about a bunch of fish, and in each verse the smallest one gets eaten by a progressively bigger rival. How fun to load it all into a Powerpoint type of program (such as Impress, shown to the left—included on the Eee) and add some pictures! The transitions feature can even be used to effect crude animations. This to me is what people mean when they talk about the potential of the multimedia e-book—it’s not so much that anyone will want to mess around with Wuthering Heights, but for situations like this one, especially in the education market, there is great potential. When I play the song and run the presentation, the students will actually see the barracuda swoop in and snatch up the octopus at exactly the moment it’s sung about in the tale. The children will surely remember the French word for octopus now!

It’s this sort of project that had me frustrated by the limits of my previous mobile solution, the Alphasmart Dana. The Palm OS is fairly limited and cannot handle tasks such as displaying a graphic and pasting it from one program into another. The Eee was a joy. I loaded in a few presentations another teacher had sent me, and most of them worked wonderfully. The screen was just big enough for the kids to easily see, and I used the included media player to run the song while we watched. No more lugging around an ipod and speakers in addition to my other teaching gear! With the Eee, I can do it all on one device. There did seem to be one or two slides which were more graphic-heavy or had complex animations, and these lagged a little, but I’m not sure my presentation skills are advanced enough that I would use these effects in my own work, so it’s unlikely to be an issue for me.

Living with Eee: The final verdict

So, how is the Eee going to affect my on-the-go e-options? Well, the Eee does more in one package than any other device I own, save my Macbook. However, its reading software can’t handle most secure formats, so if I want to read a current best-seller, I am stuck with my desktop machine for eReader or my eBookwise for the fairly disposable bestsellers. The eBookwise also can’t be beat for one-handed reading on the subway or at the gym, and its battery life for longer-haul trips beats the pants off the two hours and change I am getting from the Eee. I’ll keep the eBookwise and get good use out of it for these reasons, but I probably won’t replace it if gets broken or lost. I think devices like the Eee are here to stay as part of the electronic marketplace, and they’ll get better and cheaper and ever the more popular as time goes on. If the next generation of Eee-type gizmos ups the battery ante, it may be a very different story. Who knows, they even get  the market saturation necessary to promote one of the many e-book formats to industry standard!

I think my Dana is on its way out, though. I like it as a keyboard, and its battery life has the Eee beat hands-down. But the Palm OS just isn’t as robust as even the most basic Linux system, and I can get a lot more done with my Eee. My only complaint: Linux is hard. I appreciate the potential it offers for advanced power users, but I wish it was a little more intuitive and a little less labor intensive for the rest of us to do the little things.

Moderator: For people who want the Windows flavor of the Eee, I notice that BestBuy’s price is now $400. – D.R.

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