A New Class of Portable ???

After Palm left us underwhelmed with their new Foleo device, I wasn't expecting much else in this category with all eyes on the iPhone. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Asus has decided to join the fray with a simplified twist on the laptop, and a reported price tag of around $200.

What does two Franklin's buy one today? The specs include a 7" screen, a mobile Intel CPU, 512 megs of RAM, with both 10/100 Ethernet and b/g WiFi connection options. There's no hard drive with CF cards performing this duty. With no mechanical hard drive and that small of a screen I was a little disappointed with the 3 hour run time, but it's still better than many notebooks out there today. To keep the price down, the operating system is Linux based, but it is Windows XP compatible.

I'm especially excited about the 0.89 kg weight (1.96 pounds to the nonmetric Americans). At that weight and price, I would definitely look into this as an able travel companion, if not for other uses. As long as it could surf the internet and word process, that's 90% of what I need to do on the road as well. I could also envision students. particularly younger ones getting a lot of use out a machine like this.

Between the Palm Foleo, and now this from Asus, is there a new class of device developing- a small notebook with a flash hard drive? Is this the next evolution of the notebook? I'm interested to see if others introduce any similar devices.

--Jonas

Sources:
Engadget
HardwareZone