I was at the E-Zone (Electronics mall(?)) at Jayanagar today. Saw a ASUS EEE PC for the first time. It was exciting enough for me to shout out to my wife, over the din of all the music/cricket match in the background.

First thing, it is very small. It does look well built. The screen was bright and nice. It might fit into coat/jacket pockets easily. The keys are tiny though. I could not type with both hands. Had to resort to 1-finger typing. Even then, I was concerned about hitting the 2 surrounding keys. From the window looks, I initially thought it was running windows XP, but I recalled that ASUS had customized linux to look like windows. On closer inspection it turned out to be so.

But the biggest disappointment is the price -- Rs. 17,500/- for the 4GB model. That is almost $440! Amazon sells the 8GB model for $399/-. Rs. 10,000 is a good price point if this has to take off in India. At the current price it is too close to many entry level Acer laptops.

Update 2008.June : I now own a 4GB model of EEE-PC, which I bought from Bestbuy in Carmel,IN. I primarily bought this machine to be our windows PC. My notebook is a Mac and home PC runs GNU/Linux.