Ultra-portable PCs are hardly big news these days and if you're happy to make a few sacrifices for the sake of portability, they're a great way to lighten your load if you need a laptop with you at all times. Unfortunately, they're also a great way to lighten your wallet and the smallest, lightest models cost £1,200 and up.

So, you can imagine the hullabaloo that greeted the unveiling of the Asus Eee PC at the Computex trade show earlier this year. Not only is this one of the smallest and lightest ultra-portables ever made, but it's also one of the cheapest. Actually, that doesn't really do it justice - at a mere £219, the Eee PC is practically a freebie in laptop terms.

The Eee PC is ostensibly a competitor to the OLPC XO-1 (the '$100 laptop' that now costs $200) and Intel Classmate PC - both low-cost, lightweight laptops intended for use in education. With a desktop footprint barely bigger than A5 and tipping the scales at just under a kilo, the Eee PC is certainly an ideal candidate for computer-hungry kids who are already weighed down by text books, but these are features that obviously make it strongly suited to other users too. 

Despite the unbelievable price, the Eee PC certainly doesn't feel like it's been cobbled together to meet a tight budget. The case is entirely plastic, but it feels extremely solid and there are no fragile parts to snap off or lose. The lid is thick and reassuringly rigid too, although we'd be happier if there was a latch to keep it closed when it's being jiggled around in a school bag.

We've only seen 'pearlescent white' models so far, but the Eee PC will also be available in 'galaxy black'. The white finish certainly looks clean and classy, but black will be a better choice for resisting dirty fingers and the inevitable Biro marks.

The keyboard is normally the first thing to suffer when a laptop shrinks below a certain size and the one on the Eee PC is certainly small. The 'full size' keys are 15mm wide and 13mm tall; the Enter key is about half as wide again, and the Function and a few punctuation keys are a bit smaller. The layout is surprisingly standard, with only the vertical bar ("¦") key being relegated to an unexpected place next to the Escape key.

The keys' small size may deter touch typists hoping to keep their fingers on the home row, but they have plenty of travel and a pleasant, positive action. The reduced dimensions takes a little getting used to, but the keyboard is certainly adequate for typing long documents (this review was originally typed on it) and it's certainly light years ahead of any UMPC keyboard we've seen.

Unfortunately, while the small keyboard works surprisingly well, the tiny touchpad that sits beneath it is less successful. It's probably adequate for the dinky digits possessed by most children, but at 54mm from corner to corner, it's a bit too cramped for adult fingers. It's quite deeply recessed into the wrist rest too and the tall lip that surrounds it just adds to the awkwardness.

We've read reports online about the touchpad being overly sensitive, but this can be adjusted in software. There's no way to tweak the acceleration setting though, and it takes a swipe and bit to move the mouse pointer from side of the screen to the other. The single mouse button also seems like an odd choice in a world that's now standardised on two, and it was a bit too stiff on our review model. The mouse buttons  do fall comfortably under the thumb, though.

The other component to suffer from the Eee PC's compactness is the screen, although it's not immediately apparent why. There's enough room in the lid for a 9in panel, but Asus has opted for a 7in one and as a result, it's surrounded by a thick black bezel that makes the screen look even smaller. The empty space hasn't been completely wasted - there are small stereo speakers at either side of the screen and a webcam above it.

Despite its size, the screen is still usable, if a little lacking in contrast. The matte finish makes it usable in most lighting conditions though, and the brightness can be cranked right down to 'almost off' for making the most of a dwindling battery.

With a resolution of just 800 x 480, you'd expect to encounter problems with button disappearing off-screen on tall dialog boxes, but the pre-installed applications don't seem to suffer from this - you'll have to take your chances with other third-party programs, though. Few web pages look their best at this resolution, but pressing F11 to enable the full-screen mode in Firefox (default web browser) certainly helps.

Although a Windows XP model is due at some point (no doubt with a suitably higher price tag), for the moment, the Eee PC ships with Xandros Linux (at least that's what the files in the /etc folder suggest ) and a very Windows-like Gnome Desktop. There's a Taskbar, System Tray and trio of buttons in the top-right corners of windows, but no Start menu equivalent (although there's already a hack to enable one) and instead, programs are launched with a single click of the various icons that sit in six tabbed windows on the Desktop.

The pre-installed applications are all open source - OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird and so on, plus convenient shortcuts for the leading webmail providers. The handful of programs under the Learn tab give passing nod the Eee PC's educational bent, but there's otherwise nothing to give the Eee PC away as a laptop aimed at school use.

There's nothing to stop you installing your own applications either, although there's only 1.2Gb of free space on the 4Gb SSD drive in the Eee PC 4G model -- the rest is occupied by system files. You can't uninstall the pre-installed programs to free up space either (or at least they don't appear in Add/Remove Programs - Linux boffins will no doubt be able to figure it out), but you can boost storage capacity by means of the SD Card slot.

Unscrew the panel on the underside and you can also upgrade the stock 512Mb memory, though you'll have to remove the single DDR2 SODIMM first. There's a vacant Mini PCI Express slot under here too, but with Wi-Fi built-in, the only really use for this is to house an HSDPA adapter - assuming that you can find the necessary Linux drivers.

A 900Mhz Mobile Celeron processor seems a bit weedy in these days of Core 2 Duo chips, but it seems sprightly enough in the Eee PC. A cold boot takes 40 seconds, a normal shutdown about 10 seconds and there's very little hanging around waiting for programs to launch. Video playback is smooth too and we successfully watched both DivX files and ripped DVDs stored on an external hard disk.

The Eee PC is quiet, too. The only moving part is a small fan to blow warm air out of the case and you can just about hear this with the laptop pressed to an ear. This only spins when the laptop is being worked hard though, and the underside really only gets warm to the touch.

Battery life is better than expected and the Eee PC lasted for 3 hours 31 minutes in our light use test, with Wi-Fi disabled. You'll still need to take the power adapter with you for all day working, but since this is simply a chunky mains plug with a very long cable, that's no great hardship.

As you've probably realised by now, at £219, the Eee PC is a complete and utter bargain. Anyone looking for a cheap and capable laptop for their child should snap one up immediately, but we suspect Asus will sell them by the lorry load to people who just want a laptop they can tote around all day.

Even more impressive is the fact that there's very little to belie the low price, although the small screen is a dead giveaway and it does lend the Eee PC an air of "my first laptop". But given that any sneers will probably come from people that have paid five times as much for their ultra-portable, who cares?

Asus Eee PC 4G

Specifications

[Related: Asus Eee PC 900 review]

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