ASUS Eee PC 701

29 Oct 2007 10:52

The ASUS Eee PC 701 is a great notebook. It's extremely affordable, attractively designed and highly portable. If you're looking for an ultraportable travelling companion or a cheap second computer, there are few better options.

Design
The Eee PC is one of the smallest notebooks we've seen. It measures 22.5cm by 3.5cm by 16.5cm — about the size of a hardback book — and weighs 920g. Its petite dimensions give it a toy-like appearance, but this is offset by a pearl-white finish and solid build quality, which lend it a touch of sophistication.

Because it's so small, some sacrifices have been made. The TFT screen is only a 7in. unit, with a native resolution of 800 by 480 pixels, while the keyboard is distinctly cramped and flexes slightly when you press the (closely spaced) keys. The gap between the keys on a standard desktop keyboard is around 5mm, but those on the Eee PC are less than 1mm apart, so it's easy to make mistakes. Fat-fingered users will have a hard time typing long documents, or making notes at speed; but don't let that put you off — it's fine for drafting short to medium-length documents.

Despite the Eee PC's small size, you get a reasonable selection of ports and slots. There are two USB ports on the right, a third on the left, plus a full-size VGA-out port for those requiring an external display. There's also a flash card reader on the right-hand side that supports SD/MMC media. The modem (RJ-11) port on our review sample was blanked out as there's no internal modem, but there's an adjacent Ethernet (RJ-45) port so you can connect to a wired network.

Video conferencing fans will be pleased to note the webcam sitting above the screen. This is also useful for taking still self-portraits or making short movies for Facebook, YouTube and so on. The stereo speakers are sensibly placed on either side of the display, but the microphone is strangely mounted on the underside of the system, which affects audio quality slightly. You can, however, connect an external mic or external speakers to the audio jacks at the left side of the system.

One final note about the design: the Eee PC's power adapter is proportionally as tiny as the notebook itself. In fact, it looks more like a mobile phone charger, which is great since you don't have to lug an enormous power brick around.

Features
You don't get much in the way of hardware for £219, but the Eee PC shouldn't be written off. It uses an Intel Mobile Celeron-M ULV processor running at 900MHz, which is designed for long battery life rather than hardcore number-crunching. The ASUS version ships with 512MB of RAM as standard, although other resellers such as RM offer versions with 256MB. If you intend to tinker heavily with the machine or install Windows, we'd recommend getting the 512MB model.

One of this machine's key features is its use of a solid-state drive (SSD) rather than a conventional hard disk. The biggest capacity supplied by ASUS is 4GB, 33 per cent of which is already in use when you buy the machine; RM also offers a model with 2GB. If you need more storage, you'll have to use a memory card in the SD/MMC slot.

The Eee PC comes with an integrated 802.11b/g Wi-Fi adapter based on an Atheros chipset. ASUS says that some versions of the Eee PC ship with an integrated 3G module costing an extra £40, which will allow you to get online beyond the office and public Wi-Fi hotspots. This was not implemented on our review sample, though.

Part of the reason the Eee PC is so inexpensive is that it eschews Windows in favour of Linux — in this case, ASUS's own Xandros-based distribution. The system also ships with some 40 applications, including Firefox, Skype, OpenOffice and SMPlayer (for video playback). And because it's a Linux machine, you can download as much open-source software as will fit into the available storage space.

Performance
The Eee PC isn't a fast notebook, but its 900MHz CPU and 512MB of RAM are just fast enough. Applications generally open a couple of seconds after clicking and it's powerful enough to perform tasks like image editing without too much delay. It generally boots up in about 30 seconds, which is quicker than most Windows-based notebooks.

Battery life is quite impressive. ASUS claims it will last approximately 3.5 hours depending on the tasks you're performing, and this was in line with our own experience. With very light use, we got the machine to last for around four hours.

Conclusion
It's hard to fault the ASUS Eee PC 701, mainly because of its price. It can be difficult to use because of the cramped keyboard, but it's better than a number of similar-sized ultraportables we've seen. If you're in the market for a second PC, or looking for a computer you can take with you almost anywhere, the Eee PC is definitely worth buying.

Editor's Note, 4/3/2008
Since we published this review late last year, we have had another ASUS Eee unit (the 2G Surf model) in for further testing. As part of a project on low-power computing, we devised a simple workload test and measured the system's power draw (using a Voltcraft Plus Digital Multimeter VC-940).

The workload test involves typing a short (187-word) document, creating a small spreadsheet and a graph, browsing a couple of web sites and playing a YouTube video (specifically, this one). Because the display is the major power-consuming component of a notebook, we performed the test twice —: first with the screen brightness set to the maximum and then at the minimum setting.

The Eee is certainly a low-power device, drawing an average of 14W with maximum backlight and 13.2W with minimum backlight. Idle and peak power figures were 13.3W and 16.5W respectively with maximum backlight and 12W/15.6W with mimimum backlight.

For comparison, the Inveneo Computing Station, a low-power desktop system, had an average power draw of 19.9W, peaking at 23.5W, under Windows XP. Another small-format notebook, the Intel Classmate drew slightly more power in the workload test than the Eee: 16.7W and 15.3W on average with max/min backlight respectively, and 20.8W and 17.8W peak.

The total time to complete the workload test is a function of operator work-rate, system usability and system performance, and is therefore a somewhat fuzzy benchmark. However, it's worth noting that the Eee's two workload test runs (19.9 minutes and 20.5 minutes) were slightly quicker than those for the desktop Inveneo Computing Station (22.5 minutes under Windows XP and 31.2 minutes under Linux).

Bootup time is a more straightforward performance measure, and the Eee takes around 30 seconds on average to reach an idle XP desktop from power-on. Opening the browser to Google (set as the home page) took only 9 seconds or so.

Story URL: http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/notebooks/0,1000000333,39290421,00.htm