OK - I admit that last week's headline might have been a little inflammatory. However, I don't regret the debate it stimulated and I certainly learned a lot. The title of this blog within the Hydrapinion family is "Carry" and the focus is on mobile technology. That's why I'm continuing on my Eee PC focus this week.

I've used the Eee PC every day this week. I've written articles on it, browsed the web, collected email, blogged (as I am now) and played a few games. It's been used on trains, buses, in meetings, at home and in the office. In other words, I've been able to carry it around and use it all over the place.

I've installed applications to it (Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5 - there's a little head to head comparison at other blog) and modified some of the default icons on the Easy Menu screen to use the new apps and to make it easy to jump to my preferred web-mail services.

I faced all of the issues I mentioned last week. Installing apps was too hard (lots of command line and editing of text files just to install Firefox and get Flash working) but, by and large, it's now doing most of what I want. Getting Bluetooth to work with my phone is the next challenge (I have a dongle that responds to command line stuff - I just need a GUI app that works).

I've been documenting much of what I've learned along the way and reckon that I'm slowly starting to understand the Linux way of doing things. I still think that application installation needs to be simplified but I agree that the Eee PC isn't pitched at tinkerers.

It's interesting that the Eee PC was originally designed for the education market so I assume that most schools would want to add applications. That said, I'm pretty happy with what the Eee PC lets me do. I might even trade up to the 9" unit when it comes out in a few weeks.