I do not own a Cloudbook. I have however done quite a bit of research on the Cloudbook and decided not to purchase one. There are some distinct pros and cons taken from online articles and user product reviews.
PRO:
30GB HDD (lots of space)
1.2 GHz VIA C-7 processor (vs eeepc underclocked pIII 571 and 630MHz)
DDR2 533MHz FSB
Small, lightweight
Good battery life
Cool running
Durable
Good wireless connectivity indoors (40 feet)
CON:
gOS is reported to be resource hungry
Wireless is not very good in gOS
Slow speed hdd (4200 RPM)
Everex support provides poor customer service
Difficult to upgrade RAM (upgrading RAM also voids warranty)
Everex admits that units sold via walmart.com do not have software pre-installed and did not include the recovery cd to permit installation of software. They are attempting to recover from this but have been suggesting that users download and burn the software themselves.
Some users report wireless connectivity problems in outdoor locations
Everex has included XP drivers for download on their website (even though installing XP voids the warranty). It seems that people are happy with the machine but not the OS and are dumping it in favor of XP or another Linux OS. Users on Cloudbook forums are having mixed success with alternate Linux OS solutions but have installed Ubuntu, Debian and Puppy Linux (all require work arounds).
Here is a quote from an article at O'Reilly.com:
Some of Asus competitors have fared poorly. The Everex CloudBook has been dropped by WalMart stores and relegated to their website where Linux PCs have been available for a few years now. The Everex product, despite superior specs, doesn’t perform as well as the EeePC and didn’t get the gee whiz reaction that the Asus product got.
Although I think it worth noting that there are users out there that just love gOS on the Cloudbook.
Vector Linux will install on the EEEPC but for some reason wireless networking just does not work (among other things). I have searched extensively for a solution. The only alternative to a clean VL install is a highly modified Slackware 12 install available through forum.eeeuser.com.
I do own an EEEPC 701 and absolutely love it. I found the default Xandros desktop os to be highly configurable. I did away with the unionfs partitioning, the easy desktop, kde and some other non-essentials. I use ICEWM with ROX-Filer (although PCManFM is very good with this os). It is very fast when operating in this configuration. My only wish would be to install VL but I have not been successful in making it fully operational on the EEEPC.
