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Ulrich, my co-worker, has brought the famous Asus eee PC at work today. I spent 20 minutes playing with the machine.

You can see it on the foreground. Behind sits (elegantly) my macbook pro, and in the background our Nabaztag (which will soon announce Hudson build result, more on this some day).

The eee PC is small, made of plastic (I don’t like the touch of the eee PC). It boots quite quickly, and the interface is nice. The screen is way too small (800×480 if I remember correctly). Why the hell did they mimic the Windows XP window theme is beyond my understanding but anyhow this is a surprising machine.

I pretty sure that if I was more tolerant to computer interfaces I would probably buy one. Alas, it’s been one year and a half that I work daily on a Mac, and I can’t stand anymore some basic annoyances  like :
- Not beeing able to detect that I’ve plug a network cable in
- Not beeing able to startup and shutdown when I lift or close the cover
- Not beeing able to detect and adjust accordingly when I plug an external monitor

There is two things that look promising, the very small form factor, the fact that is can runs linux (command line, java developpement) and windows (small games…)
Not for me, even for my elder kids I probably wait for the next version.