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My new EEE PC

With some luck I grabbed an Asus EEE PC – a white one, the last in stock – at the Saturn market on Wednesday. As I always wanted to own a subnotebook my expectations were quite high, but I have to say: I’m impressed! The EEE comes with a whole lot of software (OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Kontact, Konqueror, … even Java JRE 1.5) and can be customized without end. I installed several games, the VLC media player and the Opera browser, which works really fine with the page zoom feature.

On the photo you can see the EEE along with my PSP. This shows how small this thing is. Also the weight is impressive, but best of all: It can decode MPEG-2 (DVB transport streams) and H.264 without dropping a lot of frames. That’s really cool as the CPU runs only at ~ 600 MHz.

While my colleagues are already queuing to do some multimedia tests I’m looking forward to testing the Java capabilities of this device. Full 1.5 mobile java runtime … sounds great to me

Easier Multimedia Programming with QT?

The QT 4.4 preview was released lately. Major new features are the WebKit Integration and the Multimedia Framework. Both have their roots in the KDE development. Multimedia support is backed up by Phonon and will use existing codecs on the target platforms (DirectShow, Quicktime and GStreamer). Trolltech writes they are focusing on playback … Does this mean to us that implementing a multimedia application (not only a player) will be easier? Will there be Let’s see and wait.

Some background information is found here and here.