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Home » RTW Travel » Asus Eee PC - This might be the ultimate traveling laptop at the moment

Asus Eee PC - This might be the ultimate traveling laptop at the moment

Over the past 5 or 10 years, one of the most contentious debates for RTW travelers is whether they should bring a laptop computer with them or not. Many people, including me on my RTW trip, do use the hell out of them while traveling, but even if you use them a lot there are many obvious downsides. They are expensive, heavy, bigger than you’d like, and quite fragile as well.

Starting in late 2007, Asus came out with their famous Eee PC 700 model, with a 7-inch screen, starting at US$399. On May 12, 2008, they are rumored to be coming out with the new 900 model, with an 8.9 inch screen, which has been released in other parts of the world already, so this whole RTW laptop debate might be changing again.

The only real downside to these tiny Asus computers is their small keyboard makes tough typing difficult for most people, especially those of us with large hands. But aside from that they solve nearly every other problem with laptops on RTW trips. They all feature a solid-state memory instead of a hard drive, and this is key for two major reasons: Without a hard drive they are much less fragile than your typical laptop, and with solid state memory they turn on in much less time. You can open this thing up and it’s on and ready to type on or connect to the internet in about 15 seconds. This feature alone will make using them more much easier.

They are so small that you can keep them in their pouch inside your daypack, and then if you think of something you want to write about you can just pop the thing open and you’ll be typing in 20 seconds. And when you are done you can just close the thing instead of having to boot it down. This is a major advantage while traveling, because you won’t have to plan long computer sessions in advance. Instead, you can just pop the thing open almost anywhere. Of course there is wifi on the thing, so if you think you might be near free wifi you can be loading web pages in about 20 seconds after the notion comes to you.

They also come preloaded with OpenOffice, Skype, Firefox, and various other handy programs that are plenty for most RTW travelers, but not too much. They don’t have a ton of on-board memory with these models, but they do have an SD slot so you can just pop the card in from your camera to view or manipulate the images, and cheap USB flash storages devices are easy to find anyway, so it’s probably just as well that you have to store most of your photo collection in a safer place.

If the new 900 model is $549 or less, then that’s still not such a huge price that you have to worry every minute about it getting lost or stolen. And since you’ll have your main computer at home, and all your valuable files safely on that device, there just isn’t much risk if something goes wrong with one of these.

If you look around on RTW message boards, you’ll see plenty of stories of people taking a laptop with them, and very few stories of those laptops getting stolen. It seems like it would happen to everyone at some point on a journey of 40,000 miles where you don’t know where you are going, but the reality is that nearly everyone returns with their laptop safely in tact.

Since these things weigh less than 1 kilogram, or right around 2 pounds, and take up so little space in your pack, I think this could really be worth it for many people who weren’t considering taking a full-size laptop. I plan on buying one before my next long Europe trip later this year, and I’ll probably report on my experience as I go.

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