EEE: a hot niche market for software houses?
I haven´t had much time to play with the EEE yet, since I spent most part of the last week (and hundred percent of my energies) packing my stuff and moving in a new apartment.
Anyway, I´m definitely trying to think about new ways of using, and new softwares to write (or to modify) for the EEE. There´s no doubt in fact the little laptop is a real (even though simple) computer, but it´s also evident, when you use it, that most of the application aren´t intended to be displayed on a 800×480 resolution.
Have a look at two examples:
Thunderbird “account settings” contains way too much options to be displayed on the small screen, and there´s no way to access to all of them, unless you use an external monitor and switch to 1024×768. What happens if you have a dialog box with the Confirm button falling outside the screen?
Eclipse isn´t really an example of a typical application for the EEE, but it is a good example of why a big class of softwares is barely usable on this platform: if you look at the picture, you´ll notice that some 30% of the screen space is occupied by useless stuff like menu bars, icons and borders.
So, is the obvious conclusion that EEE screen resolution is not enough for real-world usage? I don´t think so; on the contrary, I think there´s enough space for doing most of everyday work.
Looking at the world from a 800×480, however ,made me realize how “noisy” are modern UIs; how much value have a menu bars, icons, big traslucent borders in my user experience? Close to zero, I´d say.
Obviously, these are only my ideas; there are, however, some facts: Asus sold out 400k EEEpcs in a few months last year, and it´s expected to sell at least 2 millions devices on 2008. Will 2M users+ be enough to convince software houses to write software designed for the little EEE screen? I don´t know what you think, but it looks like a hot “niche” market to me!
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