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I can’t believe it’s taken this long to put this up. Better late than never, I expect. The diminutive black Asus Eee 4G PC has become a constant companion. Here, I’ll quickly take you through a tour of its externals. Maybe in a few weeks time, I’ll show you what it can actually do…

My unit comes from far ashore, having been unboxed somewhere in an airport. Hence, I can’t give you any gratuitous unboxing images. The most important aspect is that the Eee is here. Local supplies are unsteady, and the price for the 4GB model quite a bit higher than what I paid for it. The package contains the Eee itself, a power supply with a UK plug (giving you some indication as to its country of origin), protective pouch, driver DVD for Windows and some manuals. The battery is replaceable and takes roughly 2 hours to complete a full charge. The moment you lift the Eee, the incredibly small size of this notebook becomes apparent. I’ll provide a size comparison sometime, but for now take a standard softcover novel. That’s a good approximation of the size, if the Eee is unopened.

The provided protective cover is a flimsy sponge material, eagerly sucking moisture from hands holding it. The pouch does the job of protecting the unit from scratches and closes with a small piece of velcro.

The photo of the Eee cannot illustrate more than the unit itself. This could be any notebook. Trust me: the longest edge is only 22cm long! The build quality is excellent, putting many expensive notebooks to shame. There’s not a rattle or loose panel. Overall, Asus have taken care to build a gadget that should survive the bumps inevitable in daily use. Even the plastic outer shell seems immune to light scratches and one of my pet hates, the ability to capture fingerprints. The hinge is solid, and there is absolutely no flapping of the screen section when opened.

On the left side, we find the 10/100 RJ45 port for LAN connections, one of the three USB ports, and the 3.5mm microphone and earphone jacks. The optional modem port is covered by a shield. In the standard edition of the unit, the modem is not installed. It’s also something I would never use now that USB HSDPA modems are cheap and readily available.

On the right, a VGA connector for an external monitor or projector, the two remaining USB ports and the SD card slot. The Eee‘s BIOS allows the machine to boot from a variety of connected or internal devices. Booting an OS from a USB flash disk or SD card is possible. For now, I’ve inserted a SanDisk 8GB SD card for additional storage for files and installation of programs.

Nothing fancy at the back of the unit. The battery can be removed and replaced with a spare. The power socket sits at the back, on the right.

The keyboard initially feels very small and cramped. Tactile feedback from the keys is good, and after a couple of hours of hacking, typing speeds are sure to increase. The layout of the keyboard is almost a standard notebook keyboard, though I had to get used to the location of the Del, Enter and Shift keys.

The internal 4GB drive is solid-state. That means the Xandros operating system boots in seconds. Taking up roughly half of the available 4GB, there is almost 2GB left for user storage. That’s plenty. Don’t forget that you’ll store most of your stuff on the SD card, and that may be removed and swapped. For a device of this size, and given its intended use, that compromise is perfectly acceptable.

To indicate what’s going on, the Eee sports four LED’s to the front, right-hand side of the lower panel. These indicate the power-on state, battery charging status, solid-state disk activity and WLAN status. A sad omission from the included connectivity features of LAN and WLAN is Bluetooth. Maybe in the next generation.

The screen is, similar to the keyboard, initially very small. It does take some getting used to, but is clear, easily readable and has sufficient brightness for most environments. Don’t expect a great experience in the outdoors with lots of sunshine. The 7″ panel is flanked by rather large speaker mesh. Above the screen is the integrated webcam. The webcam is surprisingly effective, though doesn’t provide too high an image resolution. The speaker performance is reasonable – I’d suggest plugging in external speakers or using earphones.

The keyboard has numerous shortcut keys as is common on notebooks. It’s easy, and often essential, to reduce or disable certain features to improve overall battery performance. By default, screen brightness levels are almost 100% and the wireless LAN is enabled. I’ve found that reducing the screen brightness levels to about 45% and disabling the WLAN can make the battery last for almost 4 hours. Not bad for an ultraportable.

It’s easy to be disappointed by the battery performance of the Eee. My initial reaction to watching the battery meter drop from 100% to 80% was based on the fact that the Eee is so small, it reminds me of using the Nokia E90 or other mobile device. One somehow expects a battery runtime of a day, simply by considering this to be another mobile device. The Intel inside sticker prominently displayed near the keyboard should serve as a reminder that this diminutive marvel is a fully-fledged notebook, quite capable of efficiently running Windows XP and Linux, amongst others. For that reason, the 3 hour battery lifetime is certainly nothing to be ashamed of.

That’s a quick rundown of the Eee‘s outside. Once you get your hands on one of these, you’ll wonder how you ever managed to lug around that big 17″ notebook!