The Asus EEE is one of those things that you never knew you needed until you get it. I have been so impressed by this tiny machine that I am planning to get my own once I have to give back this one that I borrowed from work. So what exactly is a sub-notebook anyway?

speakers at either side and a webcam at the top for video conferencing. I must admit the only pictures I've got from this cam are 320x240 pixels which look tiny even on the EEE's screen. The main keyboard is small as you would expect. Well the whole unit is half the length of my standard 103-key keyboard so you have to save space somewhere. Yet the keys are responsive but at the same time difficult to use quickly. If only they hadn't stuck to the standard keyboard layout they could have increased the size a little to give it that little bit more usability for us fat-fingered folk.

indicators on the front bevelled edge for power, battery-low warning, hard disk activity and wi-fi connectivity. The case also features three USB connectors, a VGA output for a standard monitor, a SD/MMC card slot, network (RJ45 cable), phone, headphones and microphone sockets. The internal drive on this one is a solid-state 4GB hard
disk which doesn't sound like much but use a 4GB/8GB flash memory stick in one of those USB sockets and you should have more than enough storage for most people. The whole case is about A5 in size and about an inch and a quarter thick so this really is compact.

So what is it good for? Well you would certainly run out of storage space if you tried to use it for video or sound editing. It probably won't run the latest 3D first-person shooters even with XP installed. No the best use of this machine is a portable surfer or as a backup to your main PC. It's very low powered rated at only 22W which is less than most TV's. It's portability and fast boot time make it a brilliant machine for using at wi-fi hotspots to get your email or to update your blog. You could even use the card slot to preview your camera pictures on a larger screen. My favourite use is to quickly access my wi-fi router to add new devices to the mac address list but that's the thing about the EEE. It rapidly becomes your computing equivalent of a swiss army knife as you keep discovering more uses for it.

With a battery life of 3-4 hours when fully charged the Asus EEE is a wonderful mobile companion. I would choose it over devices costing more than double (see some of my other reviews), as its a prime example of the manufacturer being on-the-ball and creating a really usable PC at a bargain basement price. I would love to get my hands on the larger screen version as it can be slightly annoying having to use the horizontal scroll-bar to read some web content but that's down to website developers not thinking about what platform their sites will be viewed on. The EEE makes the best of what it has and it's default simple mode features large colourful icons. Already familiar with linux? Then use a search engine to lookup how to activate advanced mode and you can have a start-menu and multiple desktops with pastel-shaded backgrounds and access the package manager to add even more programs (if you really need to).