I've traveled with my EeePC now and am reporting in. Took my wee baby to the UK the week before Thanksgiving. I bought a fairly inexpensive converter to charge on the plane and watched movies, did work, etc. and it was incredible.

The startup and shutdown on this thing are fast, so I get a little more work time on a shorter flight. In Business Class on a flight to London, the Eee easily fit on the between-seats armrest and table so I could watch my own movie while I ate dinner.

And the Eee easily fit into my handbag so when I was out and about and wanted to check my e-mail, I could pop into a Starbucks for the (overpriced) T-Mobile HotSpot for a few minutes and it was light enough that I didn't feel like I was weighted down.

The Eee, in my opinion, is one of the greatest products a traveler can get. Once I used the unofficial Eee User Forum to get my machine running in a way that makes sense to me, it became an indispensable part of my workflow. Also? There's a fantastic program that lets me track the time I'm spending on each project I'm working on as I'm working and OpenOffice opens everything from Microsoft- I am just loving the Eee PC wholeheartedly. :)

GG

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry8320/4.2.2 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/100)

Thanks for that report. I'm going to wait a couple weeks for the 8 gig version but I'm getting one as soon as that starts shipping.

Geo Girl thanks for the report
 

I have a few questions if you don't mind.
What is the real life battery time on your model?
Are you finding the wireless connectivity to be good in hotel rooms-airports etc?Is it picking up free wifi or are you using a pay service?
Is there anything you are having difficulty doing on your eee?
Without a dvd drive how are you watching movies?(I am a tech dummy)
Are you finding the keyboard usable?
Do you wish you would have waited for the next generation?
Again thanks for the report.And thanks in advance for your responses

I recommend ripping movies to the mass storage on any portable computer, because the laser in an optical drive consumes about ten times the power of a rotating memory, and a hundred times as much as a solid-state one. With the eee, you even get to leave the weight and bulk of the DVD drive at home!

The rip process does introduce some compression artifacts, but not enough the destroy the viewing experience altogether.

1. 2 1/2 hours, with wifi running. It is as advertised. Some people at eeeuser.com have run many tests on battery usage and it falls within the parameters that Asus states.
2. WiFi connectivity is MUCH better than anticipated. I was able to use the hotel wifi down here in Great Exhuma, while my wife's Sony could not connect. I had no trouble immediately connecting to the PC in both EWR and FLL.
3. Difficulty wise, I cannot say, as I have not had a lot of time to play with it (my wife would say "read the manual", but I just push buttons:)). My feeling is that getting used to linux is the bigger problem. I had planned on putting XP on it, but am reconsidering, as the darn thing is blazeing fast in everything it does^, unlike XP. Also, then I would probably have to put OFFICE on it and eat up more realestate
4.Once again, as I get more familiar with Linux I think things can only get better. I did download the "Desktop" application from eeeuser.com and it makes things much easier. I am not a technical genius, but was able to configure Thunderbird to download my office email and have been able to set up remote printing both on the office and my home wifi systems.
5. I don't watch movies, but if I did, I would just move them to a SD card using my home computer and take the card with me on the road to view them.
6. I find the keyboard much better then expected. I have average size fingers and do a lot of one-fingered 'touch typing', and I find it no more difficult than typeing on my wife's $2,200 Sony (that I just paid $1,100 to fix after she dorpped it in a Security line and destroyed the screen).
7. Should I have waited for the next generation??? The jury is out. The question is what you really NEED.
I bought this for surfing the web and email when traveling and it is superb for that. I doubt that one would use it for heavy work or typing a novel. But one needs to keep perspective. This is a $400 unit. Were Asus to offer a 10" screen (they have stated that there are no plans) with XP loaded and maybe a 16GB internal SSD for $500, I would probably buy it. But, with the US dollar down the tubes, this if probably just dreaming.
I hope this helps.

About 3 hours.

Yes, excellent. In fact, the Eee will pick up things my laptop couldn't previously.

It picks up free WiFi, but most of it's usually locked, so I look for a hotspot.

Graphic design and web design- the screen isn't really big enough.

I ripped my DVDs to my portable hard drive (using a WD travel hard drive) using DVD Decrypter.

It took a little getting used to because it's smaller, but yeah, totally.

Nope. I love this thing.

GG

Have you considered OpenOffice?

Word! OpenOffice ROCKS!

Let me chime in that I haven't had much time to dig into all it can do or change things around, but I'm loving it for what I've done with it. I just got back from a quick trip with it and the size, weight and useability cannot be beat. The keyboard I'm okay with except for the right Shift key (I keep hitting the arrow up/pg up key instead) but I'll adjust to that as well.

OWA is working a bit quirky with Mozilla but that might be the providers fault and not the PC, I need to play some to verify that. I'm even getting used to the OpenOffice programs and might just keep linux and not go with the MS OS as I was thinking I likely would.

It has so much packed into so little, it's really an amazing little package. I'm very happy I didn't wait for the next generation, whenever it might be introduced.

For DVDs I carry a 1.8" external 80gb HDD. Apricorn makes 'em or you can get external enclosures and dissect an old 5th gen iPod for the hard drive. The 2.5" have more capacity but they're quite a bit larger. The 1.8" drive is SO small it's like carrying nothing. If you use DVD Shrink, you can fit a DVD into about 800MB-1.2GB with decent quality, so you could carry around an entire library of movies and music easily. Of course you could also just use an iPod in disk mode. :D

On WiFi; the Eee has the best reception I've EVER seen in a laptop. Not sure if it's the plastic case or what but it picks up stuff nothing else will. Great for leeching off others' networks! I don't use XP often but it's nice to have when I need it... my next step is to try to get MacOS running off an SD card! I'm kinda doubting it'll work though.

You can remap the up arrow and right shift key so they're swapped if that'd help you out. There's a howto in the WIKI of eeeuser.com if you're interested.

I picked up a 160GB passport USB drive - for my travels, it will be both for movies and for storing photos I take. At the end of the month I'll be off to London, with NYE in Dublin and about 9 days in Ireland, a few days in Amsterdam, a day in Brussels and then back home through London. Should serve me well!

I used to travel with a Dell Axim PDA with wifi and bluetooth, and a full-size, tri-fold bluetooth portable keyboard. That worked out very well for me in eastern Europe last Feb-Mar timeframe until it was stolen. I had no problem typing on that, being full size.

The keyboard is smaller on the eee, and I type properly and very quickly - 90 to 105 wpm depending on the day. I find my big manly fingers making a lot of typos on the little keyboard but I'm getting better with repetition. This post is being typed on it right now, in fact.

I wouldn't dare load Windows, unless I go through the hassle of putting a custom mini-install on an SDHC card. But I only got a 4gb card and it's just for my user data, and future application installs if I should ever run out of local space on the 4gb SSD (975mb free after adding a half dozen apps I want). I may load a small instance of Ubuntu on the SDHC just to see what packages I can make work there.

As for battery - I turn the screen brightness way down (and can still read with no issues), the webcam is always off unless Skype is running, and I manage to get over 3 hours. About 3.5 actually. Just wish I had an empower adapter for my UA flights coming up but I don't want to spend the money for such a limited use device I then have to carry around Europe with me.

I forgot to ask, what kind of power converter for on the plane? I mean what type of plug goes into the Asus? Is it proprietary or something generic? Thanks.

I have a cheapie power converter I bought at Fry's. I think it cost under $20 and the Eee power plug goes into the converter. The converter has a convertible airline/car plug, though the car plug worked just fine on every AA flight I was on.

-GG

Ah, got it. Thanks.