I bought the ASUS 8G a few months back for traveling. I use it on the road mostly for managing my photos, email, Skype, and keeping my blog up to date. I ride a Wee-Strom and am reporting this (with the 8G) from Watson Lake, Yukon. I'm three weeks into a month-long trip into Alaska, Yukon, and B.C.


I have found the 8G to be reliable and it packs easily into my carrying bag that goes inside my Givi hard cases. I just keep the 8G inside the included neoprene cover, tucked between clothes inside my bag. The Linux OS is much leaner than any flavour of Windows, it only takes about 30 seconds to boot. Once Windows XP is obsolete, I suspect I will be using Linux at home too. The 8G automatically detects wireless networks and gives you the opportunity to log into one. I have had a couple of times where, for some reason, the 8G does not recognize an available network. If you know the network name, you can manually configure the network by launching the network config tool using the network icon on the tray. This usually gets the connection going.


Photo Management


I carry a small USB hard drive that I copy my photos onto for backup purposes. The 8G has an SD memory card slot, so I use the file manager to just drag and drop the pictures from my camera's SD card onto the hard drive. The 8G has three USB slots, and jacks for headphones and an external monitor.


One of the handiest tools is the batch processing mode of the Photo Manager. I can choose a list of photos from my camera and resize them for my blog all at once. I always take my pictures at maximum resolution and they have to be shrunk and compressed before I can upload them.


I downloaded and installed a rather good (read: free) bit of Linux software called “Gimp” which is a clone of Photoshop. I use this tool for minor touch-ups and cropping photos before uploading.


Text Management


I use the OpenOffice document tool to type my daily journals (it is basically a MS Word clone). I cut and paste from OpenOffice into my blog page. This allows me to prepare my blog entries offline and get them uploaded quickly.


Email


I use the included Thunderbird software for my email. I like being able to prepare my email offine. I access my email via a pop3 server and Thunderbird connects easily. I configured Thunderbird on the 8G to download email, but leave it on the server so my home computer will still get the incoming email. I found that my ISP will not let me access their SMTP server for outgoing mail when I am off of their network. I got around this problem by setting up a Gmail account. Gmail has a public SMTP server, and I have configured Thunderbird on the 8G to send outgoing mail via the Gmail server.


Skype


I use the 8G for both Skype between computers and Skypeout from my computer to the phone network. Both work without problem. I have had a problem keeping the 8G's camera enabled. I haven't sought a permanent solution to this, as I usually can't be bothered with video calls.


The only other thing I can think to mention is that the battery life seems to run about 90 minutes which is more than adequate to find a signal, sit outside a building with unprotected wifi and get your mail etc. taken care of.

I don't find the small screen too much of an impediment, and feel that it is a reasonable compromise for the size and portability of the computer.