Asus showed a small laptop at Computex in June and it is finally close to shipping. The Eee PC has a seven inch screen, a Celeron clocked below its rating, four gigabytes of flash where the hard disk should be, and a price starting somewhere near four hundred dollars depending on which configuration actually reaches shelves.
Every write-up I have read frames this as a laptop with things removed. That framing is wrong, and it is going to produce a lot of bad products over the next two years.
Watch what people actually do on a laptop. A browser, a mail client, a text field, and something playing music in the background. That is the workload for most of the hours most machines are switched on. A Core 2 Duo with two gigabytes of RAM and a hundred and twenty gigabyte drive is not being used to its capacity by that workload. It is being used to about a tenth of it, and the other nine tenths are what you carry in your bag and pay for in battery life.
The Eee is not underpowered for that. It is correctly powered for that, and everything else about it follows from being honest about the workload.
The flash storage is the part I would point at if I had to pick one thing. Four gigabytes is not much and you will fill it. But there is no drive to spin up, no head to park, nothing to break when you put the machine in a bag while it is still awake. It boots in a handful of seconds because there is nothing mechanical between the processor and the operating system. Anyone who has waited out a laptop resuming from sleep on a train knows exactly how much that is worth, and it is not a spec you can put in a comparison table.
The Linux build Asus ships is a simplified launcher with big icons and a fixed set of applications. Reviewers will call it limiting. It is limiting. It also means the machine does one job and starts fast, which is the entire proposition.
Here is what I expect to happen, and I would like it written down so I can check it later.
Asus will sell more of these than anyone at Asus is currently planning for. Within a year every laptop manufacturer will have one. And in building theirs, most of them will put Windows XP on it, because that is what the retail channel asks for, and Windows XP needs a real hard disk and more memory, and the hard disk needs a bigger battery, and by the time all of that is accounted for you have a slow, heavy, four hundred dollar laptop instead of a fast, light, four hundred dollar appliance.
The thing that makes the Eee interesting is the set of decisions Asus made about what to leave out. Those decisions are the product. A competitor who copies the screen size and the price without copying the restraint has copied the packaging.
I want one, and I want it to stay this specific. I am not confident about the second part.