Waiting for Tripoli ( The Asus EEE pc)
Jan 25Living in Europe is a lot like living on Tantooine. All the fun
stuff seems to be happening on the far side of the galaxy. When it
comes to tech stuff that is. Macworld, CES, the OLPC project, Netflix,
Renting movies on Itunes .. It are just a few things that are mentioned
so many times on blogposts, websites podcasts and what have you. All
fine and dandy if you live in the US, bummer if you are in Europe.
Movies on Itunes (hire or download ? ) forget it. Ces ? No way to get
there without blowing a lot of cash, Podcast expo ? only if you
honeymoon to Vegas and get a chance to swing by.. But for the rest ?
Some of these major tech meme’s sound a lot like a loud party in the
house next door. Fun .. but no way to get in. The only thing the net
has done is peeked my desire to “get in” on all this. With the whole ”
Asus EEE Pc ” it only got worse.
For those of you stuck under a
rock , The Asus EEE (dubbed “Tripoli” by yours truly .. TRIPLE E =
Tripoli) is a small lightweight linux based ultraportable. A little
laptop with A 900 mhz processor, a 7 inch screen , a 4 gig solid state
harddrive, 512 megs of ram, wifi and a webcam. It runs Linux (it can
even run XP ) and is the Utopia when it comes to portability. There has
been a lot of controversy about this little device. Most of it people
complaining what it could NOT do. (Video editing, playing games,
burning dvd’s, getting Jenna Jameson to give you a blowjob) but that is
not realy what it is designed for. This baby is built for sliding away
in your geek-purse (yes there is such a thing) whipping it out whenever
you have the chance and booting it up super fast to surf the web, read
your email, pipe out a tweet or shoot a picture of your smelly socks
with the built in webcam and sending it to the local dry cleaners.
Looking
at the combination of the price (400 $) and the ridiculous exchange
rate dollar/euro I quickly calculated that this might be the cheapest
‘porn surf enabled’ device I could ever buy. So franticly surfing over
to newegg and waving my Visa around .. I wanted to place my order. “Not
available in the US” it read on the screen. Like poor old Luke
Skywalker watching his friends Biggs fly our with the rogue squad while
being left behind .. I felt left behind too. Amazon ? Same shit
different site. There was no way to get my hands on this baby.
So
patiente is a virtue perhaps, but in hindsight (or should i say
anticipation) I do think the “Tripoli” is a darn nice product. Forget
the “macbook air” (snobbish peace of overpriced, underpowered anorexic
excuse for a laptop) This is something you can really afford to forget
on the train without knawing off your left arm in guilt. 400 bucks for
an ultra portable ! What more do you want. Its like a PDA on Steroids.
Don’t believe me ? Check out the video the guyz from It-idiots did on
the Asus EEE pc.
Links : Asus EEE Pc The IT – Idiots episode on the EEE-Pc
