[pbarrette]

Hi all,

Several of us already own the Eee Note.

I purchased mine from a vendor in Taiwan with the intent of replacing the 3 paper notebooks I carried back and forth to work every day. For that purpose, the EeeNote has been an excellent replacement. It's primary function, as illustrated by its name, is note taking.

The Wacom screen is high resolution, pressure sensitive and recognizes Wacom penabled pens from other devices. While the 2 (yes two) pens included with the EeeNote don't have a built-in eraser, the Eee Note recognizes and properly responds to the erasers on pens from other netbooks. An added bonus is that the EeeNote can work as a normal Wacom tablet when connected to your PC via USB.

The device appears to be very durable, with an aluminum case and protective matte glass screen. It also comes with a leatherette binder which the Eee Note snaps into at 4 points and is difficult enough to remove that I don't think it will ever slip out accidentally. The binder also has a hole for the rear facing, 2MP camera. I haven't yet dropped mine, so I can't say exactly how durable it is, but another owner has purposely broken and removed the glass panel while keeping the LCD screen intact. A chinese site reports that the LCD panel is encased in some form of resin instead of the usual glass, which he suspects was done for durability.

The LCD screen does suffer from some lighting problems related to viewing angle and direct reflectance. I have noticed that this is never a problem in brightly lit areas or outdoor use, but is limited to low light viewing. There is a video circulating on YouTube which compares the Eee Note to a e-ink screen which makes the Eee Note look wholly unusable. I can attest that this is not the case. The video appears to have been shot with both devices nearly parallel to the camera angle, which exacerbates the issues which exist with nearly all LCD screens. While e-ink is certainly superior in contrast and viewing angle, the LCD screen on the EeeNote is perfectly acceptable to me. The fact that it is an LCD screen means that it is capable of following your pen strokes without the lag normally associated with e-ink.

There are 8 capacitive touch buttons on the bottom of the Eee Note display. The function of the top 5 buttons are variable depending on the application in use. The bottom 3 buttons are Left, Home, and Right. These buttons can be used for page turning in the book reader application. The buttons can be enabled or disabled from the top menu in any application. This prevents accidental button presses when resting your hand on the EeeNote while writing with the pen. In the latest firmware the buttons are automatically disabled upon entering the Notes application, though I wish they would re-enable when leaving the application.

The Eee Note has 4GB of internal memory and an external micro-SD card slot. The 4GB of internal memory is actually a 4GB micro-SD card in an internal, hidden slot. Both slots are capable of accepting SDHC cards and a few of us have replaced the internal card with a 8GB SDHC card, thus boosting the internal storage capacity to 7.5GB. Approximately 500MB of the card is used to hold the firmware.

The Eee Note uses an xScale based, Marvell processor (pxa303) and runs embedded linux as its operating system. The applications are built on a Qt/e framework with the main application acting as the windowing server and the other application as clients. ASUS has provided the source code for Qt and some other GPL sources, but have not yet provided the kernel sources. They have, however, provided the source code for their dictionary application which demonstrates how the application client/server messages are passed and handled. Someone with more C++ and Qt experience than I could easily create new applications for the Eee Note or port existing ones to it.

I was able to determine the firmware file format which allowed us to look into the OS without removing the 4 screws which hold the unit together and removing the internal SD card. Research allowed one user to determine that the EeeNote startup scripts attempts to run a script or application from the external SD card slot at each boot. This allowed us to install a telnet server on the EeeNote so we can play around with the internals as we please. This also allowed me to figure out how to convert our EeeNotes from a Chinese language interface to English.

I was also able to study the PC based EeeNoteSync application. From this, I created a PC based application which is capable of loading firmware onto the EeeNote from the built-in emergency bootloader. This allows me to reinstall the firmware onto the internal SD card even if the card is completely empty or unformatted.

I do think that the EeeNote will be a serious device in the coming months. I realize that the screen isn't e-ink and isn't in color. I believe that the note taking functionality with wifi based Evernote sync, basic web browsing and hackability of the device along with its relatively low price will make it a success. If not, then it's already a cult favorite for me.

pb