It arrives! The Eee PC is here!

By Christine Lemmer-Webber on Thu 20 March 2008

I'm bubbling with excitement. It just arrived. Oh man oh boy oh man oh boy!

Morgan and I drove by the office and saw two UPS trucks passing to the next house. I parked and bolted out of the car, bubbling with questions about whether any packages for me arrived. The man calmly explained that, yes, he left a few packages inside, as someone (Ric Lee, the company founder) had let him in.

Sure enough, there it was. I've opened it and haven't played with it that much, but let me say that even having seen it before, I didn't realize how small it is until I actually held it in my hands. The keyboard is indeed tiny, but manageable. My WPM was hindered a bit by the size as I tested it out, but its definitely doable. Overall, the design feels totally solid. My only regret is that I got a white one. (White? I always prefer black technology, or at least something cool like deep blue.) That's OK, I have a bunch of python stickers from PyCon that I'll plaster it with. The Linux distribution it ships with has a very Palm OS-like desktop by default, which is pretty lame, but since I can install Ubuntu, I'm happy.

Now I'm off to meet Doug Napoleone to talk about next year's PyCon site. I might be volunteering more this time around. We'll see how things go.

More impressions later as I continue to play with this thing.