Asus Eee PC | EeePC | Ultra Portable Laptop
I can’t tell you how glad I am to see the ultra portable laptops coming back into favor. I’ve got a couple of old used sony vaio’s that are great little portable machines – lightweight/go anywhere…. The old Dell laptop that I have is the opposite it is a big desktop replacement – two optical drives/etc. Bulky and somewhat annoying to take with anywhere. Well, first HP has launched a ~8 inch portable and now asus. The Asus Eee PC looks like a great small portable. It’s about the size of a small book, uses a 4GB flash hard drive.
Asus has a page of information here eeepc and I’ve even seen some selling it with linux preinstalled – like this. The price is not too discouraging either. For too long the smaller laptops usually had the heftier price tags. This new breed of ultra portables is coming in around $400.
Now, the smaller keyboards will cause some people a bit of discomfort, but … for a small portable web browsing client this is hard to beat on portability. A real screen which beats most pdas/phones for web browsing, flexibility to run a desktop os and applications. (512MB memory 4GB flash hard drive and 7″ screen currently.) I’ve seen that a 8.9″ screen is coming and I’ve seen rumors of larger flash hard drives. Oh, built in wireless and a built in webcam on this device as well.