Whats the attraction of the E? Its not nearly as small as the Z, infact there are more than a few laptops out there with similiar specs (older yes).
Compaq M300 (thin and about the same exact size - cheap on ebay)
Panasonic CF-17 & M34 (heavier, touch screen same footprint size - usually around the same price on ebay)
Thinkpad 240x (about the same exact footprint - cheap on ebay)
Sony Vaio PCG-C1VPK (which is slightly smaller than the E ... though more expensive)
Toshiba's Libretto family (various models).
Just seems to me at its size the E isn't that special, all of the above are full blown machines with plently of potential. I use a M34 for work assignments at work, I have a friend with a full debianised 240x... etc. I looked at the reviews and battery life is low too me for a solid state machine (m34 gets 5 hours average). Not trying to be negative, sorry if it seems so ... just curious what the buzz is about these, too me they seem like watered down alternatives. The very reason I bought and latter upgraded too a newer Z is because I could POCKET the device and walk anywhere with it. If its not pocketable then I already have one of the best alternatives out there. Just love walking to anyplace and being able to dig out the Z work on something and put it coozy back in my pocket.
Back on topic, bought a 4gb SDHC card, things work fine. Ebayed an 8GB A-Data for a nice price, looking forward to testing it on the Z. Will report back when it gets here.
Re the eeepc-- I think part of the buzz had to do with the initial low price - which was promptly inflated. a very cheap very light laptop would be nice, wouldn't it? That it was offered running linux was cool, too -except it is some goofball corporatized variant with some GPL violations, apparently, rather than a standard (read free and supported) distro like debian or ubuntu or gentoo or slack. So, it was a sorta fictitious product that caught our attention- a cheap ownable (non-green) OLPC sort of tiny linux laptop. By the time it hit the shelves the buzz was on- though the product wasn't quite what we expected.
Looking foward to hearing about sdhc progress. A big sdhc might make me reconfigure. the microdrive dedicated to OS and swap with a big sd doing data would be a good setup.
The price inflation really depends on where you get it. Everything becomes expensive in a place with high exchange rate and sales/import tax.
GPL violation? I think the situation is more serious for the distros for the Z. Asus has released a full source recently after receiving complaints on the web. Ignorant (though not malicious i reckon) as they are, at least they respond to the justified complaints and do something to make up for their mistakes.
Why is the EeePC so attractive? It has the genuine form factor of a sub-notebook, and runs much much smoother and faster than the Z. There are things which will never happen on the Z: Skype, flash playback, rmvb, to name but a few. And it is pretty light and very portable (of course not as pocketable as the Z), just like a 400+ page octave hardcover book. It is not that (jacket-)pocketable, but it doesn't feel like a pain at all to carry it around, compared to my macbook (2.2kg!).
Indeed there are a lot of alternatives out there, but the EeePC stands out because of the very competitive price (my black 701 costs just 385 USD -- cheaper than a new or even a second-hand Z), hence a superb price/performance ratio.
Is the default distro (Xandros) non-standard? I wouldn't say so. It runs Icewm in the "Easy Mode" and KDE in the "Full Desktop Mode". It can apt-get install from the standard Debian Etch i386 repos. There is also a customized
eeexubuntu which is among the most promising project.
Few laptops have generated so much buzz like eeepc. In
the eee user forum you see as much enthusiasm as the OE forum.
It's wiki is very well-organized and informative.
And more importantly, hacking this beast is more straightforward than doing so on the Z.
I am not religious about any gadget. Yet this kind of sub-notebooks has always been one of my dream machines, since the days of handheld PCs (especially Sigmorion III). The Kohjinsha series is gorgeous, but the price (double to triple the price of an eeepc) and the keyboard are two big stoppers to me.
IMHO apart from pocketability the Z does not really have any big advantage. Hacking this beast has never been an easy task.
But it doesn't mean that I will give up my buddy Z. Real life experience and productivity (vs. sheer pride in hacking for the sake of hacking) will tell me which path I want to follow.
Back on the topic: I am going to hunt down a Transcend 8GB SDHC, which is selling at around 48 USD. Will report here if it works on my Z. I need this card anyway because it will be part of the permanent disk on my EeePC. There is not such severe bus bandwidth limitation as found on the Z.
My 2 cents.
