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Page 1 of 3  Asus with its Eee PC mini notebook concept made a great move, starting avalanche that still spreads. Almost there is no big manufacturer of notebooks on market that didn’t launch or announced similar product. Besides huge popularity that Asus Eee PC 701 got, there were some objections which dissuaded a lot of potential buyers from shopping. Most criticism was targeted to its screen size. Even on Eee’s concept promotion (on last year’s Computex) was announced launch of bigger model, but waiting for it got prolonged more than we expected. Finally, we are in position to introduce Asus Eee PC 900 to you.
If you, by any chance, aren’t familiar with its predecessor we suggest you to first read our review for Eee PC 701 notebook . Quite expected, Eee PC 900 doesn’t bring anything revolutionary but improvements that are implemented were carefully chosen. Eee PC 900 has 8.9’’diagonal screen and 1024x600p resolution. Everyday work and above all surfing on the Internet is now incomparably cozier. Most sites are optimized for 1024p horizontal resolution and on new model horizontal scroll is eluded during site checkups. Also considerably reduced is need for vertical scrolling. This resolution is much more pleasant not only for surfing but also for regular text typing.
This time ASUS applied LED display with less consumption that offers more reliable and uniform black color from classic displays. We should mention that screen is matte, to everyone’s pleasure. Picture is bright and clear, while on strong sun light you will need to set higher screen brightness value. As we tested engineer sample, we can only hope that final product will improve that characteristic. Anyway, bigger screen means a lot and Eee 900 got a big plus for that. The best thing is that Asus just slightly changed dimensions in total. Weight went up from 0.92kg to exact 1kg.
Something Old – Something New...
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Most of us expected improvements on basic components, but that didn’t happen. Base is still composed of motherboard with old Intel 910GML chipset with integrated GMA 900 graphics card. Processor is also the same (like for Eee PC 701 model) – Intel Celeron M ULV 353 which this time works at full 900MHz (and not at 630MHz like it was for 701 model). Still, whole system is more responsive thanks to doubled amount RAM memory presence. Although Eee PC isn’t intended for demanding applications, 1GB RAM will come in handy when more applications work at the same time, which is common case (e.g. listening music and typing text). Increased amount of RAM is just one of market’s demands that Asus fulfilled.
Second big objection for Eee PC 701 was small capacity of SSD’s. We did expect capacity increasement but we were surprised with 20GB of total disks capacity. What even more surprised us was the fact that those were Solid State drives that cost a lot. What might surprise you is that we whole time use a term disks (as plural). Regardless on small dimensions, Eee PC 900 has two SSDs. Basic disk has 4GB capacity and is predicted for system files storage. The other SSD has 16GB capacity but its performances are a little bit inferior compared to basic smaller model. If we take in consideration purpose of 900 model, these 20GB represent a descent amount of storage and should fulfill needs of most users.
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