Asus Eee PC 701
08 OCT 2007
Launch price
£220.00
Stuff says
Small, sturdy and feature-packed beyond belief. If you’ve slim fingers that’ll fit its tiny keyboard, the Eee PC is a stunning laptop for the money.
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Stuff.tv hot buy
Laptops have pushed desktop PCs ever closer to the dole queue recently, but the flipside is that many are now complex, juice-guzzling beasts. Fans of the open-source operating system Linux have been calling for a small, cheap alternative for blogging on-the-move – and it’s finally arrived in the form of the Asus EeePC 701.
The EeePC is an astoundingly cheap, 7in UMPC which packs 4GB of solid-state storage and some surprise goodies in the form of Wi-Fi, 3G support and an SD card slot. On paper, it punches well above its price bracket and, more surprisingly, is an equally tough nut on the road.
Hit me as hard as you can
The EeePC’s case is solid – tougher than you’d expect a thing in this sort of price bracket to be. It’s pleasingly compact, too, giving you the happy feeling that only comes from holding something with genuine heft, and comes in five colours: white, black, and pastel shades of pink, green and blue.
The keyboard’s as flimsy as you find in most ultraportables – but that’s the only downer, and overall it feels like the perfect portable blogging machine.