Taoyuan Nights

Many of you will have heard of the ‘One Laptop Per Child’ $99 laptop project. I’ve had my eye on the OLPC for some time, but it was never clear that I would ever be able to actually buy one. Unfortunately (for me), the OLPC project is targetting developing countries, and is not selling to people such as you or I - even though it would be a great way to subsidise production costs for the developing country models.

But wait! Life will be just fine. Asus has stepped up to fill the gap. What they have produced is not a perfect competitor. The OLPC is aiming for 10-12 hour battery life with a rather slower processor, whereas this new Asus model only aims for 3 hours battery life. However, the EEE has a 900Mhz pentium M, which means it should be rather awesomely fast. It appears to be related to the Intel ‘Classmate’ low-cost subnotebook design, which was bouncing around the interwebs earlier in the year.

You can find information about the EEE PC here, here, here.

Some of the interesting features:

- 900Mhz processor.

- 7″ LCD display.

- 4-16GB solid state hard disk (basically, flash-based, tough as hell, fast, no fragmentation delays, smaller, lighter, lower power than a traditional hard disk).

- built in webcam, VGA out, USB, SD… (ooh, SD! Perfect for ‘on the move’ photo-editing then?)

- 512MB Ram.

- thin + light (0.82in thick, weighs 2 lbs).

- wifi.

- Linux-based operating system included.

Initial reports are that the machine boots up from cold in 10 seconds and shuts down in 5 seconds, so it should be great for ‘writer’s notepad’ type work too as well as the afore-mentioned ‘photo editing on the fly’.

In fact… this could well be the perfect tool for written or photographic blogging. I wonder if they realise that? Heck, dangle a GPS unit off the side, and you have a location-aware uber-blogging platform for less than a normal laptop!

According to Qbit Online, we can expect to see these tasty wee things arriving in late August. If you’re interested in seeing this mini-laptop in the flesh, there should be a demo next week at the Taipei Trade Center, as part of the TICA exhibition.

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Photo from engadget.