The cmdline-mans tablet
i finally sold my asus eee pad transformer after ~8 months of “usage”.
after two months of playing around with roms, tweaking, tuning, tooling etc and another 4 months of carrying it around thinking i will use it on my daily routine for sure somewhen, it just took me about another 2 months to admit to myself that i am not the typical tablet user and i will not find the 650€ purpose i’d been looking for.
roughly speaking: it is a nice looking device. they for sure hit a big target audience. but for smbd using terminals most of the time and hardly watching videos abroad it’s not the first device of choice. one might call me stupid, ever thinking that a tablet would fit that needs. okay, can we arrange to call it “naive”?
out with the new – in with the old
before asus jumped on the shiny new tablet train they also manufactured some netbooks. i checked back on asus websites and stores and found that they still do netbooks. i spotted the Asus EEE PC x101 equipped with a weak single core ATOM CPU, 1G of RAM, 32GB SSD, only ~920g weight and a fantastic slim look for the price of ~250€.
so, i read some reviews. they reach from “a god-made device” to “good enough for kids but you can’t do any serious work”.
however, this device sounded like it would be the kind of thing i could use. its lightweight enough to carry it around in a shoulder bag all day, install ArchLinux on ui, fire up mutt, irssi, etc quickly. and finally i do have a device holding my whole toolbox.
summing-up i’d say this device is not a toy for kids – sure, it could be one – but for ppl who have a working flow like resume from suspend --> ssh <somehost> --> screen -r 'my_screensession' --> read mail/newsgroups; IRC; work; etc etc; it is the perfect daily companion. well, at least for me it is.
