I bought myself a new toy on Sunday afternoon - an Asus Eee PC, technically, the 701 model, but it's the only model available on the market right now anyway. The specs are easy enough to find, but for a brief run-down:

• 900MHz Celeron processor
• 512MB of DDR2 RAM
• 4GB flash memory, no hard drive or optical drive
• Onboard 802.11b/g wireless, graphics, and sound
• 3 USB 2.0 ports, MMC/SD/SDHC reader
• Webcam
• 7 inch, 800x430 screen
• Built-in stereo speakers and mono microphone
• Keyboard, trackpad with two buttons
• Tiny and light, almost unbelievably so
Cheap - I paid HK$2998, which is £185 or US$386 at today's rates
• I'll say that again, this is a complete laptop for £185
• Runs Linux out of the box

It's quite hard to believe just how small this thing is. This photo shows it sitting on a sheet of A4 paper:

It weighs very little, but feels sturdy and solid in my hand. The slightly pearly white finish looks quite nice - wannabe-Apple, but slightly different. It comes with a slipcase in black, a white power adapter with a really long cable on it, a couple of bits of paper, and a DVD with Windows drivers on it. For the record, yes Asus will support you running XP on it, and they do provide drivers, but it comes with Linux (a lightly-modified version of Xandros), but don't don't intend to say any more about Windows here.

The keyboard and the screen are both... adequate. Neither is big, neither is great, but both are about as good as one could expect from a machine with these size/weight/price specs. The keyboard is perfectly usable - I'm not using it right now, because I happen to have a real keyboard in front of me, but I've been using it a lot for chatting over the past few days, and it's fine for that. I may end up remapping one or two keys, because I disagree with the layout, but that's a personal thing, mainly. Of course, the fact that it's running Linux, is what give me the confidence to say that I can just remap the keyboard to my whim... The screen is clear, plenty bright enough, 100dpi, but only 800x430 resolution, which just isn't big enough for some things. A lot of web sites don't fit comfortably into the screen, although OpenOffice.org looks quite good, and there's space for a couple of xterms. The wifi seems strong enough - certainly no weaker than my existing Dell laptop. The speakers, camera, touchpad etc. aren't bad - again, not stunning, but great value for money and very usable.

Did I mention it's very small and very cheap? Really? Well, just wanted to make sure.

The software is well done. It's Linux, through and through, with very little added or changed from a default install - apart from a pretty user-friendly menu, a driver or two, and a shutdown dialog. It's well-configured, and of course since they know what hardware they're supporting, that's a lot easier than a general-purpose OS, but they've put together a nice system, which really is easy enough for anyone to use. Apart from the menu, there's Skype for VoIP, Firefox for web, complete with a bunch of pre-arranged links from the front menu to things like webmail systems, Thunderbird for 'real' mail if you need it, nowadays, OpenOffice.org for office-type stuff, Acrobat Reader for PDF viewing, a few KDE tools and utilities, and a collection of games and learning tools - a nod to the 'official' market for the device, children. I mean it in a very good way, but there just isn't that much to say about the software other than I would now say Linux is ready for the desktop, and this machine proves it. I'm used to the first thing I do with a computer being installing Linux - no need here - but more tellingly, I'm then used to installing, configuring, updating a bunch of the supplied software to make it a machine I want to use - and I didn't have to do that either. I'm impressed, and those who know me will know that I don't say that often about software.

Oh, and it's quite small and cheap too, in case you hadn't realised.

One of the most interesting things about it is the reaction it gets. For a start, most people guess between 3 and 4 times too high when asked to put a price on it. A lot of people's response to being told the real price is to ask where they can get one from. My flatmate commented that she'd like one to take traveling with her, because her shoulder gets tired of carrying around a full-sized laptop. Quite a few people have thought it was a toy, or at least not a full laptop.

The other really interesting thing about it - apart from being small and cheap - is that it's running Linux. For me, that means I'm absolutely at home with it, having given the poor shop assistant who sold it to me a bit of a shock by diving straight into a terminal session to check out the internals. It also means I can add new functionality to it, either by downloading and installing extra software, or by writing my own. It has full support for a lot of additional hardware, even if the software provided doesn't know about it - so for example, about 15 hours after I got it, I'd configured it to go online using a Bluetooth connection to my phone, where there is no wired or wireless network available. I'll write up how to do that soon, once I'm happy it's reliable and friendly. As I mentioned above, I'm capable - and more importantly, able - to remap the keyboard; in particular, the right-hand shift key feels like it's in the wrong place, so I might just swap it with the Up key next door. I'm going to guess that the custom stuff was written by Xandros, not by Asus themselves, since it's also hack-friendly, and I've already worked out how to add new icons to the built-in menu, as the iPhone hackers have done. There's a lot of potential here...

It's not the perfect laptop. While it is very small and very cheap, it's also very small and very cheap. The keyboard is absolutely not suitable for lots of typing with adult fingers, the flash disk is too small to store much data - particularly multimedia data, which the system otherwise handles fine - the screen is too small for a lot of web sites, the battery life is good but not ground-breaking, and so on. It is not a replacement for a full-sized work machine, but it is a great toy, and I can see it being a really good traveling machine.

Also, it's pretty small and cheap, and it's not a complete exaggeration to say that chicks seem to dig it!