For the last few weeks a colleague, a journalist like me, has been badgering me for the information of the Asus Eee . She already owns a thin Toshiba Protege R100 but feels it is too heavy. I advised her to wait, because it seems the demand for the Eee is very high, and it will be very hard to buy one right now.
Then a few days ago another friend, who was also a journalist, inquired me about the laptop I was using. It was the Compal one. “It seems heavy,” she commented. It is about 2,5 kilogram, and it does feels heavy sometimes. But the laptop does the job, and it is cheap. It turned out that she was also interested in buying one. “I’m looking for a laptop. How much a thin one will cost?”
“Well, generally it is rather costly,” I said, remembering the colleague who complained that the thin Protege is too heavy. “About 1500-2000 USD will buy a nice thin one.”
“It is too expensive,” she agreed.
Because they are highly mobile, an ideal laptop for journalists will be a thin, lightweight one, which is, as a rule, costly. But generally journalists in Indonesia do not get very high salary. Thus it is rather difficult for them to get one. Unless they are subsidised by the company, like my colleague who obtained her Protege R100 with cut price.
But I think journalists do not really need a conventional laptop. What they really need is a lightweight computer (so it is easy to bring everywhere) capable for word processing (for typing their articles), e-mail and Internet in general (for sending their reports). Some buy PDA phones or Nokia Communicators, which have these capabilities. But generally it is not suitable for typing long articles journalists often need to do.
Looking from that angle Asus Eee is a very ideal machine for journalists here in Indonesia. Actually in my opinion no other machine is suitable. So it is strange for me when I heard that Asus really aimed the Eee at children, not at professionals.
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