Small systems are making a comeback with a vengeance.

My little Librettos (made by Toshiba) aged beyond usefulness a couple of years ago, and nothing under the 12″ subnotebooks has surfaced since.

Now, Asus (who, I understand, makes my 13″ MacBooks) is hitting the streets with their Eee PC.  The early version were cute, with a 7″ screen like the Libretto, but a bigger keyboard – something you could actually type on.  At a $300 buy-in, my wife (normally averse to impulse technical purchases) fell in love with it on sight and ran off to Paris with it.

That represents potential market share if I’ve ever seen it and, sure enough, manufactures all over the place have yelled Eee!!! and are preparing knockoffs.  MSI, Lenovo, Dell – all are jumping on the bandwagon and producing little machines with 8.9″ and 10″ screens, at prices well under $1000 (the Libretto was priced at $2200 at it’s introduction – way back in the 90’s.)

Asus isn’t sitting still – they’re announcing no less than 22 variants of the Eee, as of this writing.  Talk about throwing spaghetti against the wall!

So this is a good thing!

I’m waiting to snap up a 10″  Eee, I think, as soon as I get home.  Best configuration would be with a 64gb SSD and 2gb of memory, Ubuntu Linux, built-in 3G (and the regular suite of wireless).  Not sure it’s available out of the box like that, but that’s what back-end configuration is all about.

It will be nice to have a little note-taker/dashboard mapper/web-browser that I can carry around anywhere, and that will turn on instantly.  Combined with the 3G, I can be connected anywhere.

rickb