I've been using a 901 for a month and, after some tweaking, I'm very happy with it. It's easy to carry around and the battery life is great (around 4.5 hours with wifi).
Keyboard - They keyboard is the major drawback of the 70x/90x series of eee pc's mainly because of its size but partially because it flexes when you type. Occasionally the flexing results in a ddouble character being typed. However there are two things you can do to improve the keyboard. Turn on key debounce detection to prevent repeated character strokes. Insert 10 - 12 layers of aluminum foil under the keyboard to shore it up (I'm not kidding, this works very well). Info on both changes can be found on eeeuser.com's forums. One thing you can't really change is the keyboard layout which is is somewhat modified from a standard keyboard to get everything to fit. The right-shift key isn't next to the "/?" key as the up-arrow gets in the way. This doesn't really bother me as I tend to only use the left-shift with my quasi-touch-typing. The change which frequently screws me up is that the "`~" key is up on the top row of keys between Esc and F1. This leaves the "1" key as the first key on the numeric row, shifting all the number keys left by one position with respect to the rest of the keyboard. I'm slowly getting used to this but I still type "@" when I really mean "!". In general, the 10" netbooks have bigger/better keyboards. The Aspire One keyboard (which I've tried) is quite easy to type on and feels solid.
Trackpad - The trackpad is a decent size considering the overall size of the laptop. The multi-touch works nicely for scrolling. The buttons are below the trackpad which I prefer to having buttons on the left and right like the Aspire one. I tend to use tap-to-click so I mainly end up just using the right button.
SSD - One thing I didn't realize when I bought the 901 was that the 20GB solid state drive is actually a 4GB fast drive and a 16GB slower drive. The fast drive is used by the operating system leaving the slower drive for your data (music, movies, docs etc....). This is a price control measure as 20GB of high-speed SLC flash would be expensive...and I'd rather have 4GB of it than none at all. Faster flash modules are being sold by third-parties for eee pc's for under $100 and the price are coming down quickly.
OS - The default Xandros GNU/Linux OS is fast to boot and gives you ready access to the web, mail, music, videos, office editing. However, if you want to install additional programs you're limited to those available via Asus's free download service. New software you install resides on the slower 16GB SSD. One neat trick Asus did was to use a union file system that allows modifications to be made on top of a read-only version of the operating system. If anything goes wrong, it is easy to blast the machine back to the original OS as it shipped from the factory. One downside, is that the read-only OS takes 90% of the fast SSD. As updates are installed, the new files don't actually replace the old ones and more space is gobbled up. After using the default OS for a couple of weeks I installed Ubuntu-eee (one of several Ubuntu Linux distributions tweaked for the eee) and I've been much happier. While the factory restore option is now gone, I have 1GB free space on the fast SSD for additional programs. I can also install pretty much any software package available for Ubuntu rather than just those allowed from Asus (which tend to be out of date).
Screen - The screen is reasonably bright. The resolution is good enough for viewing most web pages. Videos play back full-screen nicely.
Camera - I never use it. But it's nice to know that it's a whole megapixel better than the 0.3 megapixel cameras.
Other - One nice perk to owning an eee is there is an active community of eee users. eeeuser.com contains lots of good information about using, troubleshooting, and modifying the eee.
| Standing screen display size | 8.9 Inches |
|---|---|
| Processor | 1.6 GHz intel_atom |
| RAM | 1 GB |
| Hard Drive | 20 GB SSD |
| Chipset Brand | Intel |
| Card Description | Integrated |
