Unfortunately, returning to my lab the other day, I discovered the laptop to be completely dead. Regardless, I loved my eeePC, using it mostly for its first year, then it served three years as a dial-up modem server for the home, followed by a two year stint as a webcam server, and then finally helping me along with my PhD as a terminal to be used with a home-brew Arduino-based device. Charging the battery while using the netbook meant a 9-10 hour wait due to the power supply limitations, and the 4Gb SSD wasn’t fast (it stuttered) or capacious enough, so many users needed to augment it with SD card storage which was slow due to the on-board reader. It wasn’t perfect – it was a little on the slow side, and the battery life wasn’t spectacular, being about 3-4 hours. It had a tiny keyboard and trackpad to match, and patient users could find that it was capable of more than they would have expected.
The storage was a tiny 4Gb, based around a CompactFlash controller and NAND flash, and it could run Linux or Windows XP. The device featured a 7″ screen with just 800×480 resolution, a Celeron M353 CPU underclocked at 630Mhz, and 512Mb RAM (shared with graphics). I purchased my 701 for AU$415, overpaying slightly compared to the eventual $300 price point, but much cheaper than launch prices of AU$599. They missed the price mark by quite a margin, and instead, it ended up being a new “toy” for developed countries instead. The 701 featured a stripped down specification, originally intending to be reminiscent of the one-laptop-per-child type device but utilizing Intel instead. I’m not sure how many people today will remember the Asus eeePC 701, arguably, one of the earliest netbooks which drove the concept to its eventual boom.