welcome, little Eee

When I came back from Paris yesterday, my latest toy had already arrived in the lab. It was an addition to my growing family of laptops but very different from the rest. Bigger is better is a thing of the past. The day it was announced, I had fallen in love with the Eee PC for its uncompromising mobility. It weighs about a kilo, fits in a lady's purse, and the battery lasts longer than you'd ever want to sit in front of a computer. Last week, I finally ordered mine. The idea is to take it with me wherever I go, letting me sit down and write wherever I am, whether it's a coffee shop in London, a plane over the Atlantic or the Syrian desert.

The Eee is brilliant. It is tiny – and also extremely cute. It weighs next to nothing (The AC adapter is the size and weight of a Mars bar.) but feels rock solid, and it's almost silent. There is no hard drive that spins; just a quiet fan if loads of applications are running. Booting is nearly instantaneous. The pre-loaded Linux, some flavor I've never tasted, works out of the box. I was using the computer less than a minute after first boot. StarOffice, Firefox, Skype, and photo and video management software are already built in. (Strangely, VLC is missing.)

Where are the limitations? Well, the size of the Eee can work against you. The keyboard is tiny and some keys are nearly impossible to hit without looking. On the upside, there's proper delete key, something even the MacBook Air doesn't have. Typing is a bit of a pain, and I would probably use a USB keyboard whenever available. However, this post was entirely written on the Eee, and my hands haven't cramped up yet.

The screen is tiny as well, but it displays the same number of pixels horizontally like my first Vaio did, and I was fine with that. The touchpad doesn't feel right, but that might just be a question of getting used to. While it comes with system restore disks, the Eee doesn't have a CD player. Apparently, one can easily create a bootable USB stick. Films make their way to the computer via the same media. Internal storage is only 20GB, but one has to travel a lot and write a lot of stories to fill this up.

My verdict: I love it. I can't wait to trow it in my backpack when I go home over Christmas. I now have a mighty ThinkPad for sale. (Of course the MacBook Pro still rules whenever sheer power is required.)