I’ve seen these new mini notebooks and they look VERY nice. They’re about the size of a small book which makes for nice portability. It’s nice to see the small laptop form factor making a comeback. I really hope that this size laptop is around to stay for a while. I have an old Sony Vaio which is not a bad size, but most laptops are just too big to be REALLY portable.
I think this size notebook is an improvement on the concept of the PDA because it gives you more options.
If you don’t know what a netbook is, it’s this recent class of laptops that’s very small and portable, many with solid state drives and can be a nice small portable computing platform. These are not desktop replacements, but can certainly be used for some serious work (which puts them a step above a PDA or phone.)
Anyway, this site has a great comparator of the various models currently out from makers such as Acer,Dell, etc. It gives a breakdown of the features, pricing, etc. Very nice if you’re in the market for one of these great small portables.
Many of these ultra small portables run a variant of linux or they will use Windows on them for a windows xp laptop, vista though hasn’t been used on many of these due to it’s resource requirements.