When Asus first announced that it was preparing to ship the "Eee" low-cost laptop, it garnered significant interest from many industry observers and took a bit of the wind out of the sails of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. Now, ASUS has officially launched the Eee—which stands for "Easy to learn", "Excellent Internet", and "Excellent mobile computing experience"—with models scheduled to be available in North America within a few weeks.

The Eee (rhymes with Wii) is an ultra-compact notebook with a 7-inch screen that weighs 2.03 pounds. It will be available in three different models, starting from $299 on up to $399, depending on storage capacity, memory, and presence of a built-in webcam. The low-end model, called "Surf," has a 2GB Flash drive for storage and 256MB RAM. The high-end model, which is available now in Taiwan's popular 3C computer stores, comes with a 8GB Flash drive and 1GB of DDR2 RAM. Both models feature a 900MHz Intel Celeron M processor.

While the initial models will ship with Xandros Linux preinstalled, Microsoft has been anxious to get on the Eee bandwagon. According to Davis Tsai, general manager of Microsoft Taiwan, Asus is planning to launch an Eee PC running Windows XP before the end of this year. Windows Vista is out of the question as it would require too much storage space (a vanilla install of Vista runs at around 14GB) and has higher RAM and CPU requirements than its predecessor. At least Microsoft will still be selling XP to OEMs, having extended XP's cut-off date to June 2008.



The Asus Eee. Photo courtesy Asus.

The Xandros Linux distro that Asus is currently shipping with the Eee comes with the usual open-source productivity software such as OpenOffice, but the interface is wrapped up in a shell designed both for ease-of-use and to fit naturally on the 7-inch screen. The desktop is divided into six tabs at the top of the screen: Internet, Work, Learn, Play, Settings, and Favorites. Clicking on Internet brings up a web browser, and the other tabs lead to selection screens with oversize icons: Learn currently comes with a list of educational applications including Science, Language, and Math. Under the "Play" category are options for playing games, a media player, music, photo, and video managers, and using the webcam. At the bottom of the screen is the usual Start menu and taskbar.