Small Wonder: Philippine Telcos Discover the Asus eee
I’ve been a fan of the Asus eee PC ultra micro laptop for sometime, and like many enthusiasts I’ve succumbed to the obnoxious habit of playing the part of an eee evangelist on occasion. I must admit I’m always a sucker for small cheap gadgets, especially miniature wi-fi laptops that cost around the range of a mid-priced cellphone. (I got mine for around PHP 17,000 around November 2007).
But the eee has proven to be a trusty daily companion and a respectable enough workhouse. I have another laptop at home, a full-sized Toshiba Satellite, and there are days when that device doesn’t see the light of day, since the eee monopolizes my attention. It’s replaced the book or magazine by the bedside, and the morning newspaper is a distant memory from a bygone era – I read aggregators like Google News and Google Reader over breakfast instead.
Even in the workplace, the eee is the machine I bring to meetings to take notes with. It’s during those meetings that I have to stop what I’m doing and do my usual eee demo from the moment I open the lid and power it up. The women all ooh and ahh about how cute and tiny it is, as I play the part of a computer salesman for a few moments, enumerating the features like a real smoothie. This is fun at first, but it tends to become an annoying routine after awhile.
So I’m glad that there are moves afoot to make this machine a little more mainstream. This way, it becomes less of a novelty, and people would leave me alone so I can actually get some work done.
It just so happens that the country’s two leading telcos have discovered the Asus eee at the same time, and have taken to giving it away as a low cost laptop, or as an alternative gadget to the usual iPods and 3G phones.
SMART now offers the Asus eee as a giveaway (in lieu of a phone) with its SMART Gold postpaid subscriptions. The 2GB version of the eee is offered free with a Smart Gold Plan 1800. As an alternative, the eee is included as a bundle with a mobile phone with Plan 2500.
