I can vividly recall the moment when I first took the Asus Eee PC 701 on a trip. It was 30 October 2008, 21 days after it had been delivered, and I was on a train and my job was to report on a game festival packed schedule of events for a magazine called GamesTM which, incidentally, would publish its final issue exactly ten years later. On the way, I thought I’d make some notes, so I opened the computer on the train. Suddenly, multiple eyes stared at me.
“What’s that?” asked a fellow passenger. “That’s a tiny one,” offered another. “I bet it’s expensive – look at how neat it looks,” quipped a third, mouth munching on a biscuit, leaning over for a closer look and blasting a few crumbs in my direction.
Suffice to say I didn’t get any work done on the train that day, but Asus may well have gone on to sell a few more of its affordable sub-notebooks. Its unique selling point – a footprint of 225 x 170mm – practically defined the word “ultraportable”. This, combined with a weight of only 928g, justified the admiring glances.
The Eee PC 701 was – and is – a beautiful-looking computer; a considerately angled device in a solid casing finished in pearl-white gloss. It was the kind of device that reviewers dub “sexy”. It was also
