Is this the Ideal Mobile Working Device?
Speaking to a number of prospects one thing that routinely comes up is whether you can carry out a job function on a small screen mobile device and wouldn’t a laptop be better? There are normally a number of good reasons why it isn’t practical for example: the time it takes to start-up, ability to operate with one hand, ability to run full applications over a GPRS/3G connections and, finally, how conspicuous you look working on a laptop in a street. Clearly not all these points apply to all job functions and so may not be appropriate but are usually limiting factors for laptops. However, Asus have come up with a cost effective device that may be suitable for some situations.
The EEE PC 701 comes with solid state memory (2gb - 16gb) and costs only £200. It runs a variant of Linux and starts up in around 15 seconds. It has wifi inbuilt and a3G card will be available shortly. Software includes a full version of Firefox and OpenOffice allowing docs to be updated on the go.
The screen is still too small to comfortably run full desktop applications but the inclusion of a full browser will allow for web-based applications to be run be they corporate applications behind the firewall, AppSwing enabled back-office Windows and Java apps, or third party solutions such as salesforce.com or even Google Docs.
I am currently waiting to get my hands on a device so that I can test it out but on paper at least it looks like being a good candidate for an ideal mobile working companion.
RSS Feed