Let's Get Small, Real Small

By Ted Needleman

Those of us who travel frequently have a problem. We often need to do serious work when on the road, but few of us really relish carrying a laptop on every trip. Even a moderately light laptop seems to gain weight proportionately with the length of the walk to the departure gate and the length of the trip.

Ultra lightweight laptops have been around for years, at ultra-expensive prices. But a recently introduced pair of affordable min-notebook might change all of that.

ASUS, a popular Taiwanese vendor of laptops and computer components started the ball rolling with last year's introduction of the ASUS Eee. While it sounds like a noise you might make riding the roller coaster, the Eee is a two-pound notebook with a 7-inch color screen and a 4GB solid state hard disk. You can get it with either the Linux or Windows XP operating system for about $400.

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The battery is good for between 2.5 and 4 hours, and it comes with Wi-Fi, an Ethernet jack, internal modem, and software to browse the Internet and work on common office tasks. The Eee has an Intel Celeron powering it, and while it isn't blazingly fast, it's fast enough to be useable on the road. A model with a 9-inch screen will launch in the US this month.

If you have to have a larger screen now, consider the Hewlett Packard 2133 Mini-Note. A 2.6-pound beauty, this model has an 8.9-inch screen, an almost full size keyboard, and a hard disk with either 120GB or 160GB, depending on which model you purchase.

HP powers this mini-Note with a VIA C7 processor, rather than one from Intel. As with the ASUS Eee, the HP 2133 Min-note has Wi-Fi and Ethernet connectivity, and is available with either SUSE Linux or Microsoft Vista, with prices ranging from $499 to $749.

The smaller screen on these units means that you'll probably have to adjust the resolution when you are working on a spreadsheet or document. And forget about multimedia, neither notebook is going to be great at playing back a movie, and neither has a built in optical drive, though it's easy to plug in an external USB drive when needed.

But the lightweight and small size makes either mini-notebook a pleasant traveling companion.

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This article is from NPT TechnoBuzz, a publication of The NonProfit Times.

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