Playing with the eee

I have been messing around with the Asus eee PC. Here are my first impressions (sorry for the bullet points, I really am having trouble typing with the dwarfish keyboard {more on this later}).

The good:

• Low cost. This subnotebook has an amazing price point. Asus really outdid itself with this. At about USD 490, this proves to be an attractive proposition for budget-conscious consumers.
• Open source. This is really a win. Aside from being customizable, this really proves that Linux and open source software can significantly compete in the desktop space. In no time, I was able to add new repositories, enable full desktop mode, and insstall Beryl, among others. The peripherals Just Work (tm) -- no need for modprobe and other CLI voodoo to detect USB storage, for example.
• User interface. I have a strict usability testing regimen: if my six-year old son cannot browse the web in under two minutes, the interface has failed miserably. This one passed with flying colors. The easy mode's tab-and-button interface was intuitive enough, and provided ease-of-navigation. It's very difficult to get lost with the customized KDE UI.

The not-so-good:

• Small form-factor. Okay, I admit this may not be a device for me, but the keyboard and screen size are killing me. After squinting for about an hour while playing FrozenBubble and TuxRacer, Gab gave up, saying, "maliit ang monitor, saka may mga ganun o" (pointing to the horizontal and vertical scrollbars). Rant: Why did they place the Up arrow between the "?|/" and right Shift keys? Touch typists will despair with the eee keyboard.
• Heat. My "crown jewels" (as Jim Ayson so eloquently described it) almost got cooked. The eee generates way too much heat for its size. Heck, it gets even hotter than my Dell.

Despite the negatives, however, the eee shines as a low-cost powerful ultraportable device. (There, three superlatives -- shows how much I like it.) So far, I have installed a quite-useless but still very cool Beryl on the native Xandros OS that came with it. Contemplating on installing Ubuntu, if I can spare a USB flashdisk. I still can't get Smart 3G to connect through my phone, though, but it's most likely because of my settings rather than eee's fault.