KEY POINTS:
For some months, strange goings-on have been reported in branches of Britain's Toys "R" Us. Middle-aged men and younger males sporting ponytails and Grateful Dead T-shirts have been observed leaving the premises with small cardboard boxes which they then gleefully tear open upon reaching the safety of their cars.
Exclamations of "Yes!" and "Yeehaw!!!" have been heard by security guards, who are as puzzled by all this as their checkout colleagues. "I can't figure it out," said one store manager, when quizzed by this columnist a few months ago. "The things are just walking out of the store. They sell out the minute we get a delivery."
"They" refers not to a cuddly toy, but to the ASUS EeePC, a small sub-notebook computer made in Taiwan. It's small and light enough - about the size of a paperback book - to fit in an overcoat pocket. It has an 18cm screen, a small but fully-equipped keyboard and boots up in a few seconds - partly because it has no hard drive. It does, however, have two USB ports which can take flash drives, connect to printers etc, plus a VGA port for connecting up an external monitor, an ethernet socket for hooking up to local area networks or broadband modems, a built-in camera, microphone and wi-fi.
The EeePC, which was designed for children, has found its market niche among adults. This tells us a lot about the state of the computer industry.
The device is designed to be an information appliance rather than a computer per se. It runs Linux but you don't have to know that because it comes pre-configured: you switch it on and there it is. What you see are tabs labelled with words like "internet", "work", "learn", "play", and so on.
Click on "internet" and up come icons for web mail, web, Messenger, Skype, Wikipedia and Google Docs. Click on "web mail" and you get icons for Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail. Click on the "work" and you get OpenOffice - the Open Source equivalent of Microsoft Office.
The key thing about the ASUS machine - and the reason for its popularity - is that it bypasses most of the complexity of operating a standard computer.
To see whether it really could replace my Apple laptop, I took the EeePC with me on a recent trip abroad.
When we arrived at the destination I plugged the ASUS machine straight into our hosts' broadband modem and in seconds was on the net.
Later in the same trip I noticed that a friend was online in Spain, so clicked on the Skype button and in seconds was engaged in a video call with him. Everywhere I went, it picked up the available wireless networks without fail.
On a train journey, I plugged my 3G modem into one of the USB slots and the ASUS detected the device and configured the connection. Easy as falling off a log. (And easier, as a matter of fact, than persuading the aforementioned Apple laptop to work with the same modem.)
It would be misleading to say that the ASUS machine is perfect. The screen is a bit too small for extensive browsing (although OK for word processing), the keyboard is a mite too small for most adult fingers and the battery life is disappointing. But these defects are easily remedied - most of them.
Besides, the limitations of Mark I ought not to blind us to its significance - which is the cruel way it highlights the baroque complexity of conventional computing machines with their bloated operating systems, security problems, flaky hard drives, overheating processors and overweight chassis.
Someday, our great-grandchildren will marvel that the industry once standardised on software that required its users to press the "Start" button when they wished to stop their machine.
The days of the cumbersome, expensive, overweight laptop are ending. There is a huge demand for a network appliance like the ASUS machine that just works.
And this month, (APR) Hewlett Packard launched an assault on this emergent market with its Mini-Note, which with a bigger screen and keyboard than the ASUS machine but still running Linux and not having a hard disk, retails at just under $500.
- OBSERVER
