Friday, July 11, 2008

Asus Eee: Work Tab

Ok, so the next part of my review of the Eee takes me to the "Work" tab (pictured).

The first icon is "Accessories", and clicking this takes you a screen which gives you 3 further options. Calculator does what it says on the tin. It calculates. It's got some flexibility and looks the business is you need to claculate electromagnetism, Gravitation, Atomic & Nuclear and Thermodynamics (seriously!)

PIM fires up KDE Contact, a sort of Outlook look alike - in fact the help manual says it looks like Outlook. It looks as though it could be pretty decent, and on it's own for most people fairly comprehensive. I haven't been able to establish whether there's a way to import and keep in sync from, say Outlook. so someone using the Eee as a partner to a desktop/smartphone not using Google calendar for instance may find some limitations.

The third icon in Accessories is Screen Capture. It works in a slightly odd way - I can't find a hotkey function to capture an image - looks like you have to run it and it captures the screen under the it's own window. Still, works OK as you can see from the shots I'm suing for these posts.

Back in the main "Work" tab, next up is Documents. This opens up OpenOffice.org 2.0, the well known, well featured and free opposition to the Microsoft Office Suite. Nothing much to add here. OpenOffice is a damn good application, compatible with MS Office. That pretty much therefore covers Spreadheets and Presentations too.

PDF Reader is a......PDF reader.

Mail opens Mozilla Thunderbird, another open source, free and highly capable application which would fit most people's email requirements.

File Manager does just that, and certainly appears sufficient for most file management needs. The only thing I'd add here, and it's totally down to lack of experience, is that as I'm not used to Linux, I'm unfamiliar with some file names/structures and don't know without further research what are system files, package files, repositories etc, so best to leave alone rather than go deleting stuff willy nilly.

Dictionary opens up an 85,000 word version of the Longman dictionary. Not sure how useful this would be in practice. If you need access to a dictionary, there are plenty available online, and when this one opens, there are some strange Chinese looking characters on some of the buttons. The first "glitch" I've found so far on the Eee.

Notes is a strangle little application. Meant to replicate the yellow post-it type of note on screen (in much the same way as Outlook's Notes does, it's not immediately clear where notes are saved - I certainly couldn't find any option to save one, so just ended up clicking the close (x) box. Turns out, they are available via a little icon in the task bar tray at the bottom of the screen. Basic, but useable.

And that's the "Work" tab. Next time up, working logically from left to right will be the "Learn "tab.

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