Asus EEE Note EA800 Review

Asus EEE Note EA800 Review

Asus EEE Note EA800 Review

Hardware

The Asus EA800 or eee NOTE is a 8 inch TFT touchscreen with a resolution of 768×1024. It features 64 levels of grayscale on the capacitive touch screen and has a DPI rate of 2540. This is primarily a grayscale device with no color at all, but it does have the best stylus interactive display we have ever seen. It features 256 degrees of pressure and the Stylus that comes with it has a bit of torque, which means the pen aspect actually has some give on it.

The EA800 has a 2.3 GHZ Marvell CPU and 4 GB of RAM. We actually got a free 2 GB Micro SD card with our device but no word if the official release will have it. It does support up to 32 GB so you will have no problem enhancing the memory.

One of the great aspects of this device is the camera, manufactured by OmniVision. The EA 800 has a picture quality of around 2 Mega Pixels and looks tremendous when you are taking pictures. It also has 5 levels of zooming and the display actually gives you a visual indication on the resolution you are shooting in. The default resolution is 1600×1200 which gradually degrades as you zoom in. I found that the default camera zoom does indeed look the best and we have attached pictures we took in the neighborhood using to give you a indication on how it works. Asus has informed us that this unit will indeed shoot video, but our preview unit did not have any support for video. It did display video when you turned the camera on, but did not actually allow you to record it yet.

You can connect up to the internet via WIFI and can access both open and protected networks. The web browser that comes with the device is labeled as experimental and boy you can really tell. Web pages load abysmally slow. We found it impossible to stream music, watch videos, or even navigate the internet. With the web browser as it is, you will indeed needs lots of patience. Also, you cannot actually pinch and zoom because the only way to interact with the screen is with the Stylus. So you have to use the scrolling bar to look down a web-page, but it does not allow you to scroll down unless a web-page is fully loaded.

Software

The Asus eee Note EA 800 runs on a Linux based operating system, so it is a departure from most tablets out there that run Android. This device is actually more comparable to an e-reader than a tablet in our minds. Mainly this is due to the grayscale only interface with no color at all.

There are many applications that come bundled with the eee Note that give you a ton of functionality right out of the box.  One of the features I really liked was the first app called “Notes.” The Note program allows this device really to shine! You basically use the stylus and assign functions to it, such as a pen, pencil, highlighter, fountain pen, marker, and more. As we mentioned, this is a mainly a grayscale device. You can assign gray, white, or black as the colors. You can then save your notes directly to the Micro SD card or your devices internal memory. If you want to even make the process easier you can take a screenshot of your notes and save it to the camera directory. Speaking of the cameras, if you take pictures, you can import the pictures right into your notes. Very cool.

Another great app is the e-reading application, although our unit just came with Chinese books. We did experiment with the device and found that it very easily loads ePub and PDF books. The process is as easy as loading ePub or PDF books on your MicroSD card and then inserting it into your eee Note and then in the settings menu importing your SD card data. Your books will then appear on the library. One of the neat things about reading books is you can use the stylus and interact with the book as you would notes. So you can draw, highlight, take annotations and look words up in the built in dictionary. One feature of the reading app that just did not work was the Zoom function. Whether we zoomed in 1% or 100% it made no difference. Hopefully this will be addressed in a future firmware update.

One of the great ways you can take advantage of the internal microphone is with voice memo function. You can simply record and playback from the devices speakers or via the headphone jack. When you save recordings they appear under your Music Player application. Since we only had a pre-release build of the Asus eee Note it did not have any music playing functionality from the dedicated player. We tried all of the supported formats that claimed to have worked such as MP3′s, and even AAC, OGG, WAV, WMV and a ton of others to no avail.

Our Thoughts

The Asus eee Note EA800 certainly is a game changer in terms of stylus functionality in a hybrid e-reader and tablet. I have never seen either an e-reader or tablet with such high DPI and fluid writing and drawing. Considering it only has 4 GB of RAM and a 2.3 GHZ processor it certainly does get the job done with no lag at all as you are drawing or typing.

Although there is no way to get new games or apps on it, it’s more of an e-reader than it is a tablet. This is an interesting conundrum because Asus is not billing it as either, they are simply calling it the EEE NOTE.

Also, one of the neat things is that there are no volume buttons or other superfluous hardware settings. Most of the functions like volume adjustment or most other things is done via the software side of things. If you are used to Android and in the top right hand corner you can click on things and edit everything directly on the screen. You can click on the Time, Volume, WIFI, and a ton of other functions.

Personally since this is a Linux operating system you figure that Asus or Hacking communities will develop other applications for the device, or tailor existing apps to suit this unit. Given that the hardware is decent and it has great RAM, most common apps should be able to be integrated. I would love to see a proper photo editing application or another program to take advantage of the pressure sensitive screen. At least, I would love to see a program with far more brushes and different sizes in order to really fine tune the art.