Believe it or not I often meet people for whom technology is of little interest. Shocked? I know! Personally, I find this attitude very curious as for me technology plays a major part in what life is all about. When asking people about their technological disinterest they often tell me that dealing with technology is a major hassle factor or that they deem technology too complicated. For the most part I get the impression that this is not so much disinterest but instead a preference for the application of technology rather than the technology itself.

To illustrate this point perhaps an example may be appropriate. From time to time, interest in technological applications piques as certain technology developments crossover into the mainstream. Take Sky+ for example – it has been a great invention (not without its problems!) but I know people who still refer to it as “taping a program” when they really mean digitally recording it – I even say it myself sometimes in the same way that I’m going to “hoover up” instead of vacuuming. The point here is that the importance here is placed upon what something does rather than how it does it. Digital photo frames, which I’ve already written about in Why we love our digital photo frame, are making the crossover into the mainstream especially as they become everyday items that can be operated without a computer. Being able to send a photograph taken on your phone to a digital photo frame back at home is a really neat idea.

I believe that Asus may well have engineered one of these developments that gets it right for the mainstream and I already know from my own local experiences that this is capturing the hearts and minds of people for whom I would least expect. This development of course is the ASUS eee PC. For a start there is the very low price point, which is always a positive contributing factor. But for the most part I meet people who ask me about computers and laptops and when I ask them what they want to use it for I am often met with the response “just web surfing, email and a bit of word processing”. Very rarely do I hear people tell me they are looking specifically for Operating System ‘X’ or a X ’K’ RPM Drive Speed, X amount of memory or the like – mostly the requirement is task based. The ASUS eee PC is an ideal solution in this scenario.

Lets face it modern consumer operating systems are way too bloated for what is really needed – this isn’t really any ones fault but rather in the way that operating systems have grown over the years – as cool new features have been added or expanded – but now there are myriad options all over the place and sometimes we can spend more time finding a way to achieve a task rather than working on the task itself. We can all probably find half a dozen things on our computers that we’ve never used and half a dozen more that we will probably never use. Obviously I’m not saying that things need to be simpler (or maybe I am?) but fundamentally what Asus have done, by merging a customised front end with an appropriately engineered hardware platform, is move a lot of things out of the way and thus made their new machines task oriented – which at the end of the day is what is really needed. Not that they’ve got it perfect, no doubt it can still benefit from a little work – the screen could do with being a little bigger and perhaps a little more storage wouldn’t hurt, but in terms of providing a consumer item that lets a user get a job done – it’s a lot more suitable than most things you can get hold of these days at a fraction of the price of some machines on the market.

I expect to see a number of manufacturers jump on the bandwagon and produce machines in the ASUS eee PC flavour. This has to be a good thing – I’m certainly more inclined to get one of these machines than to try installing Vista or Linux on my PC at home.

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