I went ahead and bit the bullet. Here are my first few moments with the Asus Eee PC.



The battery is charging up right now, but I have taken a few minutes to play with the tiny, tiny PC.

Here are some initial thoughts:

• It's smaller than you think. I've typed on small keyboards before, but this one's going to take a little getting used to.
• The trackpad also takes a little getting used to. I think I'll invest in a tiny mouse for traveling with the Eee PC.
• The 800 x 480 pixel screen is a bit small for viewing many, if not most websites. But it certainly beats the heck out of most PDA/phone browsers. It will be interesting to see if Asus makes it easy to install Opera or another web browser that's capable of auto-scaling web pages.
• The operating system and preloaded applications take up about 62% of the 4GB of memory. When Asus begins shipping the 2GB versions of the Eee PC, the company will obviously have to strip off some of the applications.
  
• While initial reports were that you could either use the simple Xandros-based user interface or a complete Xandros desktop, I don't see a way to access the complete desktop yet. For most users, this is probably a good thing. The Eee PC is very easy to use right now, and includes Office software, a web browser, some games, an e-mail client. What more do you need?
• The add/remove software feature links directly to an Asus server. Right now there are only three or four applications available for installation. And several of them are actually just updates for applications that are already installed. I would like to see an option to install 3rd party software like Audacity, but it's not a high priority at this point.

Stay tuned for more videos/photos as I put this puppy through the paces.