{"id":833,"date":"2008-06-03T23:16:08","date_gmt":"2008-06-04T04:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/?p=833"},"modified":"2008-06-03T23:16:08","modified_gmt":"2008-06-04T04:16:08","slug":"dell-mini-inspiron-new-asus-eeepcs-its-the-keyboard-silly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/archives\/2008\/06\/03\/dell-mini-inspiron-new-asus-eeepcs-its-the-keyboard-silly","title":{"rendered":"Dell Mini Inspiron? New Asus EeePC’s? Its the keyboard, silly"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, it looks like Asus is rolling out more Eee PC’s<\/a>, with bigger screens – up to 10 inches. They’ll be loading it with an Intel Atom 1.6GHz processor, and they’re promising 7.5 hours of battery life.<\/p>\n

Now we’re talking. The Eee 701 that I own is piss poor with regards to the battery life. And the other thing that has annoyed me for a while with the Eee, is the keyboard. Its just simply too small. I try to touch type with the Eee, and its not that my fingers are fat (really, they’re comparatively thin and long), but its just difficult. The new Eee’s don’t have such an improvement.<\/p>\n

They’re still going to be shipping with 12 or 20 gigabyte SSDs. One thing I notice with the Eee is that for critical bits of information, I definitely do not even need more than 4GB of storage.<\/p>\n

I think I’m over the Eee. I’ll probably run OpenSolaris on it soon (I wonder if ZFS performs well on flash based storage?) and dock it with a real keyboard, mouse and monitor. And I think that’s where the Eee could shine (or where OpenSolaris could shine) – support a limited set of hardware from a few laptop manufacturers, and one might be a great success if everything “just works”.<\/p>\n

What’s caught my fancy this week? The Dell Mini Inspiron<\/a>. There are photos<\/a>, and the specifications according to Slashdot (take it with a grain of salt) state:<\/p>\n