Wombat Diet

A Mac-using friend sent me this link to an article on how Mac users were taking matters into their own hands and installing OSX on mini-notebooks.

He complains of lack of time, funds and… desire.

What happened to the two out of three rule? (The Iron Triangle rehearsed in project management in business school was, of course, time, quality and money).

Desire as an afterthought? I know the feeling. But then I have had a few 4AM nights lately. Desire for sleep, I have been reacquainted with.

Here, I can make an overdue confession that may be of interest to those desiring a netbook PC for Christmas.

I have, temporarily, abandoned my EEE 1000. It was and is a great concept and it works almost perfectly, but the keyboard is a maddening 1cm too small, at 25cm. For anything but checking-your-email-while-watching-TV type tasks it matters.

Frustration eventually drove me to go out and buy another machine just to see me through the end of my MBA (January). I opted for a Samsung R60 plus. It cost £399 and has a 30cm keyboard, 2Ghz Core Duo CPU, 2Gb RAM and 160GB hard drive. Annoyingly, just to gain an extra few centimetres of keyboard, I ended up with machine double the size of the Asus EEE 1000.

Samsung R60+

I’d have preferred a Q45 (smaller) but, despite steep discounts (it has been replaced with a positively nasty-looking Q210), it was still too expensive as well as hard to find.

Newer Samsungs have horrible shiny palm rests and keys, quite unlike the satisfyingly tactile and warm micro-sandpaper feel of the old black models.

I was tempted, for a moment, by a LAST ONE! offer on a Q45 with built-in wireless broadband networking, but I stuck to my self-imposed £400 budget. Otherwise, I would certainly have exceeded what I might have spent for one higher spec conventional machine when I bought the Asus EEE 1000.

We were told on day 1

We tell people not to move house, get married, get divorced or have children until after their MBA… but do they listen?

Nothing there about going cold turkey on a Linux netbook in the home stretch, right?! Happily, I had a spare copy of Microsoft Office, purchased in advance of my resolution not to give Microsoft any more money.

So, I’ve been working on the R60+ for a few weeks. It’s a very nice machine despite two particular faults: the screen is highly reflective, making it a disaster under fluorescent lights, it’s also a little bit washed out looking. And the battery life is not great, at about 2 hours. The Asus 1000 wins hands down on both counts.

However, the Samsung’s keyboard turns out to be a trump card. Overall, its an excellent value machine. It’s not that many years since I paid a multiple of the price for an inferior machine–so I don’t feel too bad about the extra expense. The Asus meanwhile, has dropped to about £279 retail.

I have seen people using the very smallest Asus PCs in the library, but they type with two fingers. So there you have it. The great, unsurprising lesson for would-be netbook users: you need to know what your minimum size keyboard is before you purchase, and a 2 minute hands-on trial is only good for telling you at once what will NOT work.

I tried a Dell Vostro laptop at one point. Great specs on paper, and a very low price (£350) for a machine with a big screen, built-in DVD etc. Then I touched the keyboard.

The quick brown wibble wobble squishwibble wobbled … yikes, thank you, very much. No.

It was like trying to walk on water with inflatable boots. Horrible enough to send a shudder down one’s back. Better to pay a bit more and get a non seasick-making keyboard. When did I last associate Dell with quality? I can’t remember. Did I ever?

None of the netbooks I’ve seen since buying the Asus 1000 made me feel

Aah, this is what I have been waiting, should have waited, for

They’re ALL too small!

I’ve looked at, and laid hands on, the Samsung NC-10, the Asus S101, two new pretenders to netbook coolness. Their keyboards are the same size as that of the Asus EEE 1000, so they failed to elicit a 2nd glance. It’s the first thing I check now.

Here you can see how the two machines compare (about the same in the glossy/fingerprint dept.). And, side by side:

There’s a couple of centimetres of border, not keyboard, under the Asus in the rightmost photo, so the keyboard isn’t as much larger as it may initially appear.

So, you are wondering, why didn’t I put Ubuntu on the Samsung? I will, I will. Soon! But if a better machine comes out first…

Related posts:

1. Netbook And Phone Convergence It seems that Samsung will be the first to upsize a netbook to a mini laptop with a decent keyboard while retaining many of the...
2. Still No Goldilocks Netbook I am back in the market for a laptop and willing to get rid of my too small to type on Asus EEE PC 1000...
3. Asus EEE PC 1000 Update My post a few weeks ago about the Asus EEE PC 1000 is still drawing quite a lot of traffic (dozens of hits) every day....
4. Review: Dell Mini Inspiron 9 v Asus EEE 1000 I passed a Vodaphone shop on my way to the university this evening and, having read that the Dell Mini Inspiron 9 was now available...
5. Bluetooth Keyboards Again I considered bringing my Ubuntu-powered Asus 1000 netbook on this trip but decided in favour of the much larger Samsung R60+ (which I reviewed here)....

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Tags: Asus 1000 EEE PC, keyboard, netbook, Samsung R60+