0Samsung Galaxy S3 ‘v’ Asus eeePC 901

There are plenty of reviews out there com­par­ing the latest phones, the latest tab­lets and the latest note­books, but very few ever ref­er­ence some­thing more than 18 months old.  Most people don’t upgrade their kit any­where near that fre­quently which makes the com­par­is­ons rather use­less.  In the 4–5 year time­frame which is a more typ­ical upgrade cycle for most people there have been huge changes to the com­put­ing power available.

In June 2008 I was asked for help to choose a device for a fam­ily mem­ber which would meet basic online and app needs whilst being as port­able as pos­sible.  The Asus eeePC 700 had been released a year earlier and the new 901 with the new Intel Atom pro­cessor had just become avail­able.  It did everything required — cap­able of run­ning Win­dows XP, with wireless-n and at around 1Kg it was just power­ful enough, and impress­ively port­able.  Bat­tery life was way bey­ond any­thing else com­par­able and could only be matched by spend­ing an order of mag­nitude more.

Jump to June 2012 — a scant 4 years later and my mobile phone con­tract expires.  After long delib­er­a­tions I even­tu­ally opted for the Sam­sung Galaxy S3 over the HTC One X.  Hav­ing spet con­sid­er­able time look­ing at specs it dawned on me that super­fi­cially it had specs not all that dis­sim­ilar to the good old eeePC.  Always inter­ested in the pro­gress of these things I did a quick comparison

The specs speak for them­selves. The phone is much thin­ner, lighter and more power­ful. It comes with com­par­able stor­age and RAM and has bet­ter con­nectiv­ity and a bet­ter cam­era. The eeePC is of course still much more suit­able for work­ing on word or excel doc­u­ments, but it isn’t all that great for that itself.

I sus­pect that most eeePC’s were, like the one in my case, bought for basic inter­net access. Mod­ern smart­phones have made this func­tion com­pletely redund­ant. People need­ing to do ser­i­ous doc­u­ment work aren’t likely to opt for a net­book either — an ultra­book or sim­ilar note­book is far more likely to be deemed suit­able because you just can’t get away from need­ing a good size phys­ical screen and real key­board. Whilst the demise of the net­book due to tab­lets was much exag­ger­ated, I believe the mod­ern smart­phone really will put an end to the net­book mar­ket almost completely.

Think we’ve missed something? Let us know by commenting below. If you would like to subscribe please use the subscribe link on the menu at the top right. You can also share this with your friends by using the social links below. Cheers.