multifarious mushrooms

I was reading bleedingedge again and they have corroborated my feeling that as everything else is getting smaller, technologically speaking, the PC would also.

I saw the queues in Australia for people wanting the buy the new iphone which combines a mobile with almost everything to do with a computer on line. The 3G mobile has existed for a while but what is added to this gizmo is that it combines an mp3 player as well as TV. However, here is a review of the new Apple Iphone

Still not the answer yet.

The laptop was another way of drawing people away from the desktop computer, most of which were made by Apple. It sounds nice, but I never bought one. I don’t need to have one as I’m not that mobile these days. Also, it seemed to fail in one most important way. How to break your back while you are using it.

Nevertheless, its sales did overtake those of the desktop computer.

Last December the ASUS Eee PC 701 was launched. It has a 7 inch screen and cut down keyboard. It only cost $500 too. It operates on the Linux platform and uses a lot of the open source programs which are free and which do everything that Microsoft can do. It only had 4 GB of memory however, but much less memory is required to boot it up. It has 3 USB ports to which you can add flash drives or another HD drive.

Obviously most web sites didn’t fit on the screen so one has to scroll left and right and the keyboard might require a kid’s fingers.

It has a web camera and Skype built in. A very cheap and portable computer.

Now ASUS is about to launch another one called Eee PC 901. So what has changed? The screen is bigger, the web cam is now 1.3 megapixels, battery life is about 4 hours and it comes with bluetooth and Pre-N wireless. You can now choose between XP and Linux. Each costs $649 but the Linux version has more memory.

Most people will probably go for the XP version. If you have a spare XP program you should be able to install it yourself. You can also use nlite from nlieos.com. That allows you to strip out Outlet Express and IE.

You can download the drivers from tinyurl.com/56okdk too.

I think I’ll keep my desktop for a while until it dies, but this cheap computer does sound very appealing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 10:06 pm and is filed under computers, gadgets, software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.