As a card-carrying member of the Apple faithful, I’ll be the first to admit I’ve chugged my fair share of the Steve Jobs Kool-Aid. iMacs, MacBooks, iPods, iPhone – I’ve got ‘em all. So after waiting with the rest of the world for the unveiling of Apple’s tablet, for the first time in a long while I was left unimpressed with the latest Apple offering: iPad. Long story short – I’ve already got an iPhone that will seemingly run almost exactly the same apps as the iPad. Meaning I can’t do any real work on it other than email and web surfing.
So, a couple of days after the iPad announcement I headed to Best Buy and picked up an Asus Eee PC Netbook. It was $299 (quite a bit less with gift cards and reward certificates). Quick rundown of the specs:
- 1.6Ghz Intel Atom
- 1 GB RAM (which I upgraded to 2G)
- 160GB hard drive
- 10.1″ widescreen display
It came with Windows 7 Starter (complete with 3 simultaneous app limit and inability to change the desktop wallpaper) which I upgraded to Windows 7 Professional. It’s a pretty snappy little beast. Best feature I’ve found is the insane battery life. I’ve can surf the web with a few odds and ends (IM, etc.) for 3 or 4 hours and still have 30% battery left. Pretty crazy. Anyway, here are a couple pics (from Best Buy).
In the meantime, I’ll be surfing the interwebs on this bad boy until the next Apple announcement…
