Ok, so I am flying on an airplane right now typing on my Eeepc, and I have to say, this is the best traveling laptop I have ever used. The guy in front of me, like on pretty much every flight I’ve ever been on, has his seat all the way back. Usually, this is a point of irritation as even my modestly sized 15″ Apple Mac is on the verge of having its screen crushed by the cramped … ooof someone just farted … come on this is a long flight …

Where was I … oh yes … so when I travel with my Apple Mac I have to prop it up on my over sized gut, and look down towards the screen. My arms are usually at about chest level, wrists at a 45+ degree angle just to type. And Buddha help me if the guy in the seat in front is a rocker. I’ll spend most of the flight deathly afraid that my screen will be crushed at any given moment. Not to mention there is nowhere to put my, ahem, coffee since the whole table is consumed by the laptop.

Me and my vacation coffee

But, hey, no more! I am sitting quite comfortably with my elbows resting on the arm rest, my hands are in their normal position (though slightly close together), the laptop only takes up about half of the table, and the screen fits fine (even though the guy in front of me has his seat back. And, yes, he is a rocker).

I would imagine watching a movie on this would be quite nice too. I was watching a movie on my iPhone until I ran out of batteries. Watching on the iPhone was a nice experience, and since this screen is, what, double the size of the iPhone, I am sure it would be just fine. Additionally, I am charging my iPhone with one of the USB ports – this doubles as a great … ok some one on this plane has really bad gas … charging station.

I am a bit bummed the Eeepc doesn’t run OS X very well, but not for the reason you might expect. Well, if you know me you might expect it. On the Eeepc I am running Ubuntu with Gnome, and one of the things Gnome does only half way is support emacs bindings. You can setup Gnome to use the emacs bindings, but it’s inconsistent. For example, here in gedit, if I do ctrl+d it deletes the whole line, ctrl+f sometimes starts up find – there are quite a few other areas where it fails to behave correctly. It’s almost worse that it kind of works because it turns into a game of “what the heck just happened to my text”.

On the Eeepc, it would be fantastic to support the bindings correctly because getting to the arrow keys (and backspace key) is awkward, but using the control key is cake. To me, lack of emacs binding support in general is a show stopper for me to switch to Gnome. Curse you OS X and your comfy chair!

Since I am just rambling, what the heck is with copy and paste in the Gnome terminal? It’s almost as silly as on Windows – almost. Since someone of times past decided ctrl+c made sense for copy, and also for the terminal’s “stop doing that right now” keystroke, hacks must be implemented (another reason why Mac’s command+c is a better choice for copy).

That ctrl+d thing in gedit is very annoying…

So, Apple – he says as if Apple is a person – when are you going to come out with the EeeMac? The Macbook Air was interesting, but I think something more like the Eeepc would be a bigger hit (depending on the price I would guess). The Air is not quite what us cattle travelers sitting in the back of the bus need / want. Sure it’s light, and sure it’s all solid state, but it’s big – it’s thin, but it’s big. This Asus is the perfect travel Mac laptop. The only problem is, it’s not a Mac.