Tom’s Hardware reviews the ASUS 3e PC

The team over at Tom’s Hardware (an excellent site for the geekier among you) have posted a brief review of the ASUS Eee laptop. A laptop, incidentally, that has been garnering rave reviews for it’s Debian (surprise!) based Linux desktop.

I suspect it would be equally, if not more, compelling with the Zonbu OS installed. At least for the mainstream users.  They liked the unit and said it held a lotof promise, but for its relatively small keyboard:

One big advantage of the is being able to connect standard peripherals. Either Linux or Windows XP is a far more capable operating system than any of the alternatives, but the limited storage means you can’t install as many applications as you might want. Performance isn’t the limitation you might expect, but the cramped keyboard may prove the real stumbling block.

You can read the full review here: http://www.tomsguide.com/us/2007/11/19/a_linux_ultra_portable_laptop/

-Mr. Zonbu

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American Enviromentalism – Keep the Hummer, double the power and fuel economy

Zonbu’s chairman and CEO are both French transplants to America. They bring with them a somewhat continental outlook and, dare I suggest, sensibility. But is this approach compatible with the prevailing American psyche?

In America it’s bigger, better, faster, stronger. Green often doesn’t play well with the BBFS approach.

A recent cover story in Fast Company magazine featured a mechanic from Kansas who has been hot-rodding diesel and bio-diesel drivetrains and dropping them in large American SUVs and classic land yachts like 60’s Lincolns and Chevy Impalas, doubling horsepower and fuel economy. In fact, the Governator recently had one of his vehicles delivered to Kansas for some eco-magination. What does this have to do with the Zonbu? Lots…

What applications do home users really use?

I read an interesting post and comments over at Download Squad recently. It was entitled “What programs do you load after a fresh windows install?” and it outlines many great programs to improve your desktop experience. Most I had heard of, a few new gems I hadn’t.

Two things struck me. One, now that I use my Zonbu as my principle home desktop, I don’t load things. I don’t worry about things. They’re just there. I don’t re-install windows. In fact, I just bought a brand new fancy-pants quad core PC, almost exclusively for gaming. I haven’t hardly loaded a thing on it except Call of Duty 4 and Test Drive Unlimited. I do all my nuts-and-bolts stuff on the Zonbu.

And secondly, as you look down the list of apps that the authors and subsequent comments suggest, the vast majority are freeware and/or open source. In fact, most of them are available on Linux (with the exception of the spyware and anti-virus tools).

What that left me with was the distinct impression that the operating system itself is largely going away and applications are going cross platform…

Zonbu gets the details – print to PDF included. Nice.

I was trying to book a flight today with some old British Airways points, but to travel entirely on American Airlines. The process proved to be a bit more complex than I would have liked (I’m not sure the British entirely get e-commerce yet… do you really need eight screens to book a flight?). I arrived at the end of the process with the standard screen showing my itinerary. A pretty typical home user transaction on their PC. Only I wasn’t on my PC, as usual, I was on my Zonbu.

I realized at that last screen, that because I was on my Zonbu, I wouldn’t be able to make a PDF of the file. Since it wasn’t my usual AA website where I can look things up afterwards, and because I just spent over 100K airmiles on tickets for myself, Mrs. Zonbu and Babino Zonbu (does that make him a BlackBerry?), I wanted a PDF of the receipt.

I made a mental note to make the suggestion to the Zonbu folks to include a Print-to-PDF function in the future. Then, on a whim, I hit CTRL-P just in case…