“After the incredible success of the Asus Eee PC, other manufacturers are ready to get their piece of the pie. This means that within the next few months we are going to see this segment go from just two devices – the Eee PC and the Nanobook (which has yet to come out in the U.S. but which we have been hearing about for some time) – to many more.” Another article on the Eee says: “Five of the 10 best-selling notebooks, including the top three models this weekend do not run Windows or Mac OS X. In fact, they are different models of the same diminutive notebook the Asus Eee PC – that runs on Linux.”
Everyone’s being praising the Eee PC from the moment it was announced. That competition has arrived, comes as no surprise. Any product that can double in price from what was announced and still sell faster than anyone can make them has to be a good idea.
This sector really benefits from Open Source. At this price level, the Microsoft tax really bites. Plus, being able to put on a full office suite, photo editor, etc., for free, turns what could have been novelty products into genuinely useful tools.
Exciting stuff.
The really exciting thing is that the EeePC and its soon-to-be-released competitors will, no doubt, finally bring Linux into the public’s view. One of the competitors at least will offer a full GNOME, XFCE or KDE desktop with access to full repositories by default … possibly via Xubuntu or Zenwalk or a similar distribution.
The Microsoft crowd will spin “but it can’t run Windows applications” … and the public will see “but it can run thousands of applications all for free …”.
Then the cat will finally be out of the bag.
Edited 2008-01-31 02:17 UTC
I agree – the quoted sentiment doesn’t seem to affect Apple laptop sales – yeah, they _can_ run Windows (so can EEE) but, how many actually do?! My experience says not very many at all. My testers like their Macs but use Bootcamp to run XP/Vista for application testing but most casual Apple users I know don’t seem to bother… or be that bothered.
That’s because the two big killer ‘apps’ that make people say “but it can’t run Windows applications” actually run on Macs. Namley MS Office and the Adobe/Macromedia stuff. When people say “but it can’t run Windows applications”, most of the time they are talking about those two application suits.
Well, OpenOffice.org is good enough for most people, and the import/export filters also are good enough for what most people do. Importing a MSOffice Document, editing it and exporting it back usually does not break enough of the layout to make you say “I should not have done that”. Just correct the two flaws in the layout when you are back in MSOffice and resume working on that document.
That is one less Killer app.
And the Adobe/Macromedia staff is either available for Linux (Flash), or has programs with equivalent functionality (kpdf, xpdf, gpdf, print to pdf).
And instead of Photoshop you can use Gimp, as long as you are not in the professional publishing and printing business.
Thats the second killer App down.
Today, the only thing holding back Linux on the desktop is the scarcity of pre-installed boxes you can buy.
Dell is trying to sell pre-loaded laptops, but they are not offering the same machine on the same page with the Windows system as default, and the Linux system as Option, Price -50 USD.
But with the boom of the EeePC, maybe some retailers will see that most people honestly don’t care what operating system they use, they just want a machine to do their work with.
OpenOffice 3.0 will take care of that.
http://blog.gobanquet.com/index.php/openoffice-3-has-pdf-import-nat…
Full OpenDocument (ODF) support. PDF import, editing & export. Office 2007 XML support. Webpage authoring. Integrated email & PIM.
More features than Office 2007 (because Office 2007 can’t do ODF or PDF). Free (as in zero cost). Open (as in “freedom” – especially freedom from lock-in). Community support. Standards support. Cross-platform. Future-proof (no forced upgrades to new versions). Interoperability. In addition to all that, it doesn’t burden you with any new “ribbon” GUI learning curve to cope with.
Edited 2008-01-31 22:53 UTC
So just because OOo has a couple of features that Office doesn’t have, it all of a sudden has more features? I don’t think it works that way (and math agrees with me).
But as has been said over and over again, it’s not quantity of features that wins a person over, it’s having the right features they need and having them work. I loath MS Office (and am no fan of OOo) and avoid it as often as I can. But when forced to use them I have to say I reluctantly prefer MS Office, not because it has more features, but because the features I need to use work better on Office than OOo.
As an example, I dropped using Photoshop for my photo editing in favour Picture Window pro (www.dl-c.com). PWP probably has less than 10% of the features PS has, but it has the right 10% that I need and those 10% work a lot better for me and are a lot easier and more powerful to use than in PS. Of course having only 10% of the features PWP will never challenge PS for market dominance, but I think the developers and all the users are quite OK with that.
Aside from support of ODF and PDF, the following are the “big picture” features of OpenOffice that MS Office is a long, long way behind in:
“Free (as in zero cost). Open (as in “freedom” – especially freedom from lock-in). Community support. Standards support. Cross-platform. Future-proof (no forced upgrades to new versions). Interoperability. In addition to all that, it doesn’t burden you with any new “ribbon” GUI learning curve to cope with.”
Only KOffice 2 (not released yet) gets even close.
MS Office misses out on most of the “big picture”. Sure MS Office does a fine job as an Office suite, in terms support for a wide array of detail functions (formatting, tables, fonts, macros that type of thing)… just about everything you can think of … but then again the other main Office suites have all that also. No-one will be short-changed for that type of feature, no matter what suite they choose.
However only MS Office users will have to suffer lock-in, forced training, excessive costs, forced upgrades, lack of interoperability etc, etc that MS Office burdens them with.
You and I know the advantages of Open Source and avoiding lock-in and all that, but I’m just not convinced it’s enough on its own to sell an Office suit to the general public.
I actually think KOffice 2 is a more interesting option, possibly with more potential than OOo, to sway people. When you look at OpenOffice you see a slightly crap clone of MS Office. When you look at KOffice 2 you see someone offering a new and different approach to many things.
Look at Apples iWork as an example. It gained popularity not by trying to clone Office, but by doing things differently in a way that many people appreciate.
Look at my original example of Photoshop vs. PWP. I chose PWP over photoshop not because PWP was cheaper clone of Photoshop, but because it did things differently in a way I consider better. The fact that it’s much cheaper was simply a nice bonus.
Wait a minute…
Does this just mean that the year of the linux LAPTOP is 2008?
WTF??? No wonder the year of the linux desktop isn’t here yet — the laptop must come first for the FLOSS world…
</lame joke>
Laptops are outselling desktops in parts of the world.
“WTF??? No wonder the year of the linux desktop isn’t here yet — the laptop must come first for the FLOSS world…
</lame joke>”
HHOS
The success of the EeePC is now obvious to anyone. It appears Asus now wants to expand on that success:
http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20080129PD216.html
Has anyone seen Tomcat? I’ve got a nice crow pie for him… 🙂
The following sounds suitably awful to me.
Anything else I can do to help, just let me know. 🙂
=====
Crow Pie:
1 crow
stuffing of your choice
salt and pepper
shortening
flour
2 Pie crust mixes
2-3 hard-boiled eggs
Stuff the crow. Loosen joints with a knife but do not cut through.
Simmer the crow in a stew-pan, with enough water to cover, until nearly tender, then season with salt and pepper. Remove meat from bones and set aside.
Prepare pie crusts as directed. (Do not bake)
Make a medium thick gravy with flour, shortening, and juices in which the crow has cooked and let cool.
Line a pie plate with pie crust and line with slices of hard-boiled egg. Place crow meat on top. Layer gravy over the crow. Place second pie dough crust over top.
Bake at 450 degrees for 1/2 hour.
http://bertc.com/three_crows.htm
=====
Edited 2008-01-31 02:36 UTC
I’ve seen him only yesterday, running away from an argument he couldn’t win. By the look of his tail being firmly tucked between his legs, I think it might be a while before you can present that pie to him 😉
RUN AWAY!
I found the point raised at the start of the second linked article hard to believe, so I went and checked for myself. Of the top ten, ninth place is taken by an HP machine running Vista. First, second, fifth, and sixth place are taken by various Macbooks. Third, fourth, seventh, eighth, and tenth place are taken by the various flavors of the EEE PC.
Not quite what the author of the article found, but stunning, none-the-less. Times have changed. I wonder if anyone in Microsoft’s management checks these things?
MS is doing just fine. They may not dominate the top 10 notebook model list, but that’s to be expected. Considering that literally countless notebook OEMs (with a pretty large range of products) use MS based OSs its not surprising to see Apple and the EeePC to have such a large presence on that list.
What really matters to MS is global share of vista/xp based notebooks. And they are doing fine on that front…
Although I guess MS should be at least a little bit worried. Growth of the budget ultraportable market could become a problem for them, especially considering the current direction MS is taking (Vista being a pig, efforts to undermine OS piracy, failure to bring about a viable low end product – who in their sane mind is going to use Vista starter edition?).
Edited 2008-01-31 06:45 UTC
Take the eeePC out of the box, turn it on and (VERY few seconds later) BAM, there’s a complete, fully working office suite and a lot more useful software. This cannot be easily done with XP (let alone with Vista), and that’s because of more than one reason:
One is that the Windows OS itself will eat through all the available resources (and then more) and works as sh!t in that small screen.
Other is that Windows *itself* costs a lot of money compared to the price of the eeePC. $50 for XP is quite a lot in such an inexpensive device; but how much would it be for XP, MS Office, antivirus, etcetera? Certainly way more than the cost for the whole eeePC with a Linux distro.
Windows + free software won’t do either against the eeePC. While most or many of the eeePC’s apps are possibly available for Windows, there’s no chance that MS will allow all that free software to be preinstalled for free, especially OpenOffice. And the choose-download-install cycle to get all that working is a huge pain in the butt, especially for inexperienced people, compared to the simple out of the box experience of the eeePC.
In all, Microsoft is needs to be extremely imaginative to compete with this, or relax its prices and conditions way beyond they have ever done before.
Agreed.
Just on the bit in bold, there is another reason why Windows + free software won’t do … and that is because the EeePC already comes pre-installed with OS + exact same free software.
Why go to all the trouble and risk of wiping the OS, then installing Windows and the re-installing the same applications (this time as Windows apps)? It would take ages to do, and you would have to locate, download and install all the applications separately, and you would end up … more or less exactly in the same place you already had when you first switched on the PC … except that now you have Windows, you are now vulnerable to viruses & malware (where you weren’t before), so now you will also have to download an anti-virus, anti-malware and firewall applications (possibly costing you money, but certainly costing you time) as well and thereby kill your EeePC’s performance.
Installing Windows (any variant) + free software on an EeePC-like machine is most decidedly doing a lot of work to go backwards.
The ultra-portable market has already exploded, and it will continue to be “dominated” by cell phones and mobile apps. Trying to draw artificial distinctions between ultra-portables and cell-phones is silly. The price point is the same, and the capabilities are nearly identical; in fact, cell-phones have the additional advantage of seamless connectivity.
The distinction is not artificial: cell phones suck for working. Trying to write a document is a PITA.
I modded you up because you have a point – “Seamless connectivity” (well, except when I take the tube to/from work). The “trick” is to add this to the ultra-mobile shirely? The only issue I can see is that holding an EEE to your ear, as you would normally operate a phone, is somewhat inpractical.
There are no artifical distinction between mobile and ultraportable devices. The distinctions between them are very real. 1 – The form factor and 2 – battery life – days or weeks for a mobile – hours for an ultraportable.
Operating my Crackberry is very much unlike operating an ultraportable – maybe the exception being the Sony models. My Crackberry (sic) is held in my hands and operated by my thumbs. Even the EEE is a laptop/desktop device.
An aside, why on earth don’t mobile phones have L & R keys like my GBA and DS? Here’s a free tip for any mobile designers out there – implement L & R and use them as shift keys _PLEASE_!
Edited 2008-01-31 12:04 UTC
Tomcat is *really* grasping at straws, here.
Here is a high end cell phone:
http://tinyurl.com/2xn3tz
And here is an ultramobile PC:
http://tinyurl.com/2sbmtp
That anyone would try to claim that drawing a distinction between these very different devices is “silly” is simply unbelievable. In fact, it seems to me that one would have to have strong ulterior motives for making such a bizarre claim, and no more credible alternative to pursue.
I’d be embarrassed if I were the one driven to make it.
Edited 2008-01-31 13:06 UTC
Just looking at the form factor of those two very different types of devices that you mention, the first thing that comes to mind is that you would have to be blind to be able to class both devices in the same category.
Way to go attempting not to back peddle. ;-p
This isn’t 1999, Mr. Delusional Anachronism. The new crop of cell phones have larger screens, keyboards, and have most of the capabilities of mini-PCs. Some of them — like the iPhone — are evolving in ways that don’t require a keyboard (ie. gesture-oriented interactivity). And, given that far more people buy these devices than eeePCs, they already “dominate” the market for ultra-mobile devices. Reality bites, huh?
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,137855-c,pdacellphonehybrids/arti…
Good luck writing a document with some images, screenshots and charts on a cellphone, QWERTY or not.
I sometimes need to do some customized documentation for our products, and there’s no way I would do that on a cellphone.
Plus those devices cannot even run the client apps where I could test stuff on. Even if they are usable on some scenarios they are not in the same range of products.
There are a few distinctions that are not so silly. One big one is apps. My ultra portable laptop is capable of running the same apps (and OS) as my desktop, making transfering work from one to the other trivial.
Another is size and battery life. I wouldn’t want a phone big enough to have a useable keyboard or powerful enough to run my desktop apps. I want my phone to be small enough to live unnoticed in my pocket and ‘weak’ enough to be on and opperating for days without charging.
As to seamless connectivity, as long as both your phone and your laptop have bluetooth they both have seamless connectivity. Secondly having features that rely on data connectivity to work is not a great idea. Have you ever checked how much your carrier charges to connect to the internet via 3G from a foreign country. If your carrier is anything like mine, you’ll know it’s prohibitivly expensive (I realize this is more of a problem in Europe than in the US).
Ah, the lengths you’ll go to in order to avoid admitting the EeePC is indeed a success…
Why don’t you just drop the anti-Linux bias and agree that there’s room enough for everyone to be successful, mmh?
It’s the year of the Linux <STRIKE>desktop</STRIKE> <STRIKE>laptop</STRIKE> palmtop.
(Hey, a bug : The STRIKE tags works in the preview, not in the postings )
Edited 2008-01-31 08:57 UTC
Of course the biggest plus point of the Eee and it’s upcoming competitors is that it is introducing linux to many people for the first time. They are doing that in the the best possible way – showing that linux “Just Works”.
The hope has to be that people who are introduced to Linux through the Eee will then consider Linux for their desktop systems as well.
I really think that these devices are Linux’s best chance of breaking in to the public consciouses in a big way. There has never been a better opportunity for Linux take a big leap forward in it’s adoption.
Yeah dude, people were asking for these like mad over christmas where I work.
Funny thing, as this article rolled in to Kontact last nite I almost bought one of these and another 4GB RAM for my newest PC (I swear I NEED 8GB).
hmmm…green or pink?
As an owner of a EeePC… I’ve to say the the strongest point about this device (obviously besides small size) is how it’s customizable. It comes with with Xandros Linux by default (using a quite nice easy to use interface, also by default), but Asus recommends installing Windows XP if you want too (the CD that comes with the machine has all the drivers… and also has the Xandros restore.)
The community is taking this device and working on several tweaks (like custom resolution video drivers and new Linux distributions focused in Eee), and also in quite nice documentation (the wiki in eeeuser.com)…
…Hardware-wise, it’s just a simple x86 machine, that will run anything you throw at it… and there’s a lot of hacks already, from adding more internal flash memory, to including mobile modems and bluetooth… even a touch screen can be added without too much trouble.
Basically, Eee is a nice opportunity for Linux, it is a nice shift from the usual notebook market that usually don’t let you customize you device too much, software and hardware, making you do all the job to look for compatible drivers and usability tools. It doesn’t matter too much what preferences you have, Eee probably can fit those if you are comfortable with the hardware size.
I just hope more manufacturers will make their devices so and easy to customize like EeePC is… And hope that Linux soon will provide nice desktop solution for this kind of device (not that there’s something wrong with linux on the device… it’s just that it’s not the best experience that can be provided… like Windows XP isn’t too). I’m sure UI designers and all the work done too support mobile devices can come together and make this sub-notebooks a better experience! =]
I am also an owner of eeepc and I must say this device, well, rocks. Since I got it I am not using anything else. What surprises me is that it took so long for companies to smell the profit in this sector. I wonder whether brands such as HP, Dell, Acer juts didn’t want to put the devices out as it cuts into their overpriced products.
Anyway, eee is unbelievable. I predict it will get a cult following even after others arrive. For it’s ugly enough
. But useful like no other. I wonder whether others will be as successful as Asus. Ok, first eees have 7″ screens, only 4G (or 8G max) of storage. But do we need more? Do I really need a bigger screen? If I would, I wouldn’t buy eee in the first place. Surprisingly, I would find it annoying if it was bigger – it is easier to write on it, read e-book and such. No, really.
And one more thing, often not mentioned. Eee comes with “direct” weblinks to gmail, yahoo mail and others but also, very important, google documents and wikipedia. I think this indicates where these devices may be heading in the future.
Edited 2008-01-31 12:25 UTC
my ideal ultra-portable:
9″ screen displaying 1024×600
1GB memory
8GB Flash drive
SDHC memory card slot
Silverthorne/Isaiah CPU
OpenGL 3.0 capable unified shader graphics
attractive case like EEEPC (not like the godawful cloudbook)
running opensuse with a KDE 4.1 desktop.
Edited 2008-01-31 12:23 UTC
I’m not sure what the availability of 9″ screens are but they’re definitely not at the price point of the 7″ which are taken directly from the cheapest portable DVD market.
EEE can upgrade with no problem to 1GB and can go to 2GB with a different kernel.
Silverthorne will have an option to release with a PowerVR SX which supports openglES 2.0 out of the box…opengl 3.0 doesn’t exist!
You’ll see the above product definitely release in 2008, maybe release Q2 2008, and likely be $100-$150 more than the EEE as configured.
i imagine a 9″ version will cost more, but i am prepared to pay that premium:
the PowerVR graphics is rumoured to be the SGX535:
http://www.umpcportal.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=2051…
which i believe is a unified scalar product capable or DX9, and therefore OpenGL 3.0 at such time as it is released and intel choose to release a driver for it.
As long as it can run Linux.
As for a 9″ low-cost low-power LCD screen, any developer company could always ask Pixel Qi, which seems to have the right design goals. A sunlight-readable screen, too. Bonus. I would hope that a 9″ 1024 x 600 format wouldn’t be a problem.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/10/pixel-qi-towards-a-75-laptop/
http://www.pixelqi.com/
I’m commenting to this on my 27lb 20″ Eurocom M590ke