Why all the fuss? I’m hoping this will be my last posting on the subject I’ve been blogging about. [UPDATE: 4 linked postings here]

NO, I am NOT going to argue that this is the revolutionary educational box we’ve been waiting for. I’ve ranted against “the next big thing fallacy in education” elsewhere.

YES, I am composing this entry entirely on the gizmo itself.. booted from a cold start a few moments ago.

Here are the reasons I think this is a big deal:

1. Alignment Of The Planets: many factors are now in place, at last, to bring about the computer I first saw when Alan Kay showed a cardboard mockup at Xerox PARC in 1972. That’s 35 years… but now the hardware, software, developer and end-user ecosystems are at last aligned to have “good enough/ cheap enough” ubiquitous computing technology at our disposal

2. GNU/Linux: it’s essentially free, and eminently hackable – and the next generation of kids will noodle their away around this stuff with no problem

3. Web Apps: Web apps have matured into stuff we can really use a LOT of the time for a lot of our computing needs

4. gOS: The ‘almost Google OS’ we see on the Everex PC, essentially combinations of 2 and 3 above with Firefox and other goodies such as Skype, makes a robust, powerful, and usable environment

5. Cheap: Hey, you can buy 3 of ‘em. Or, another way to look at this is to think of it as Your Third Computer. Forget about Desktop replacement, laptop replacement, or PDA replacement… keep those, all good in their niches – this is a perfect Third Computer.

6. Solid state: it’s quiet… no moving parts – hooray!!! Psion’ 7 and Windows HPC and others have tried and failed before… that’s partly because they didn ‘t have all the ingredients above… partly because no one wanted to fork out so much money when they could have a full-spec Toshiba laptop for the same price.

7. Does ‘enough’: it does 95% of what I do on a regular basis

8. Grandma: it has a friendly enough interface to satisfy the constraints of my fantasized “Grandma-friendly computer”

9. Kitchen: well, use it ‘wherever’ … in precisely the places where other computers would be inappropriate or too worrying.

10. No-thinkee: you don’t have to think “shall I take this with me”

That’s it… 20 minutes from cold bootup to posting this entry. I’ll need 2 more to upload the photo I just took. Only 1 beef is that the right shift key is in the wrong place… I’m a demon touch-typist, and the keyboard is tiny, of course, but fine.

UPDATE 19:35, same day: I’m adding this update paragraph from a conventional big-keyboard machine… everything you see in this posting above, as well as the Technorati Tags below, was done on the Asus Eee itself. I wrote down my start time when I opend the stone-cold machine: 15:38. The blog posting was live by 15:54, so that’s 16 minutes from a cold start, with no prep, no notes, and only 2 minutes playing with the machine a few days earlier. It then took me about 5-6 minutes of fiddling to upload the photo from my camera: the SD card worked perfectly, and the image opened up immediately… but it took me a little while to make sense of the menu choice in the image handling package I selected. No big deal. Also, I forgot to say that I opened a handful of tabs in Firefox to do quick copy/pasting of the embedded links to my old blog entries and to copy the Technorati tags I use (the ones below are the originals, copy/pasted live on the Asus Eee at the time I wrote the above notes). During all my frantic window juggling, Firefox crashed!!! I was halfway through the blog posting, but delighted to find that when I re-started it, the option ‘restore session’ brought up WordPress with all of my as-yet-unsaved draft completely intact (whew). So I reckon that the 20-minute-total time from cold start to live blog entry with photo is approximately correct – 22 minutes max, including crashed Firefox recovery. When I had finished, Mark Gaved then tried the Asus with a 1280×1024 external monitor at full resolution: it looked great! All in all, ‘full marks’. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that (a) this was a pretty exceptional, intensive and fast-paced 10-finger typing exercise, and (b) it’s now almost 4 hours later as I’m adding these notes, and my right hand aches. That’s almost certainly why this needs to be a ‘Third Computer’ for me – but in that niche, I love it. ;-) Finally, check out these cool additional resource links from Ninelocks’ blog.

Technorati Tags: rm, asus, eee, minibook, laptop, linux, olpc

Mind you, we don’t know how big the supply (of RM, the UK major Asus reseller for education) was. At least Mark got his (below) via some crafty manoeuvring and a bit of a retrieval saga involving a 20-mile drive to the depot when they couldn’t find his house…

My evidence? I’ve just finished speaking to RM on the phone… my order is somewhat delayed… more are “on the way” (10 days)…

Technorati Tags: rm, asus, eee, minibook, laptop, linux, olpc

Here’s Mark Gaved with his fresh-out-of-the-box RM Asus MiniBook (AKA the Asus ‘EEE’ PC 701). He bought one straight from RM in the UK as a pilot machine for some nifty handheld science project work he and colleagues are undertaking (described in a story over at KMi Planet).

Boot up from cold start to fully functioning GUI took about 20 seconds.

We spent roughly two minutes hammering a few applications very quickly, including Firefox, YouTube, Open Office (creating some Word-style tables and a few Excel sheets), etc etc.

No question about it: this is the real deal. Mine should arrive within about five days, hopefully, and I’ll file a more in-depth report.

Oh, and the total cost? £199 + VAT

In the photo we’ve plugged it into my giant ancient wall-mounted display and external speakers – no fuss, no prep, no cheating: does what it says on the tin. Locates the wireless network, surfs the web, runs the Open Office suite, just as promised – even better than I expected, to tell the truth. Yeah, the keyboard is small – duh, what did you expect? Stay tuned for detailed hammering.

UPDATE 1: check out this post from tnkgrl Mobil for some nice personal comments and unboxing photos – much more interesting to me than the BIG reviews that sound too much like a replay of the brochure specs.

UPDATE 2: even better than Gizmodo’s 9-reviews-of-Asus roundup, there are some much more interesting Asus PC 701 EEE serious hack/mod sites:

• Downloadsquad: up close with the Eee – Installing unsupported programs
• Brand Linder’s blog: Eee PC: Enabling full desktop mode
• NotebookReview’s Asus Eee PC Tweak Guide [Highly recommended]

Great stuff! (Thanks to Mark Gaved for bringing the Asus to my attention in the first place, for obtaining one so quickly, and for pointing out many of the links above).

Technorati Tags: rm, asus, minibook, linux, laptop, olpc, eee

My eye caught a New York Times article about the Everex gPC TC2502, a vanilla box that comes loaded with Ubuntu Linux and instant access to (quoting from a more informative CNet review):

popular and useful Web 2.0 services from Google and other vendors… Google Docs, Gmail, Google Maps, and YouTube, for example, as well as Meebo, Facebook, and Wikipedia. Sprinkled into the lineup are some non-Web-based apps, like Skype and Gimp…

They’ve dubbed their Ubuntu + GUI the ‘gOS’ (Google Operating System)… the name is unofficial, in the sense that there is no ‘Google Operating System’ as such, but what the heck: it describes the de facto situation! It also comes with an energy-saving CPU, decent peripherals, etc – what’s not to like? OK, so it’s being sold by Wal-Mart… but whereas the CNet article enthuses and links to other low cost Linux boxes for the masses, in the UK the reports were somewhat different. On a tech.co.uk posting today I see firstly, a sub-headline

Ubuntu Linux installed, but could run Vista (badly)

Ha! Trust me, the possibility of running Vista was not what attracted me to these cheap machines! Just look at this enlargement of the summary gOS screen shot above (courtesy DeskTopLinux.com – thanks!). Cute, no?

Secondly, I see this outrageous commentary on the likelihood of such an environment appearing in the UK:

So are cheap Linux PCs likely to hit UK shops anytime soon? We checked in with PC World, which said that it had no immediate plans to introduce Linux systems into its shops.

“Our customers are very used to, and comfortable with, the range of Microsoft and Apple computers that we offer”, a spokesman for PC World told us. “We have no plans to sell Linux PCs at this stage but technology is a fast-moving business so you should never say never…”

That’s pathetic. I hope entrepreneurs around the UK spot this hot niche and move into it quickly. £100 webtop box – why not? It does everything most casual users need most of the time. (And I’m no Linux fanboy – in fact, I’m thoroguhly bored with operating systems and upgrades of all flavours… I couldn’t care less at this point.) Fortunately, RM in the UK is already agressive in this niche, and is sourcing the ASUS EEE PC, essentially a £169 Linux laptop for school children, but also usable as a cheap ‘access box to go’. I’ve got one on order, and will give you the lowdown as soon as it arrives.

Technorati Tags: linux, ubuntu, olpc, asus, everex, gpc, gos