0Samsung Galaxy S3 ‘v’ Asus eeePC 901

Há uma abundância de comentários lá fora, comparando os mais recentes telefones, o mais recente guia-deixa e os últimos cadernos, mas muito poucos referenciar algo mais do que 18 meses de idade. A maioria das pessoas não atualiza seu kit nem perto disso com frequência, o que torna as comparações um tanto inúteis. No período de 4 a 5 anos, que é um ciclo de atualização mais típico para a maioria das pessoas, houve grandes mudanças no poder de computação disponível.

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.