Laptops that cost less than your phone

What do we really need in a laptop?

Well, if you’re like me most of your *stuff* lives on the web now (Flickr, Gmail, Google Cal, PBwiki, Basecamp…), not on your hard drive. So, maybe we don’t need as much as we once did from our laptops. Or maybe we just need different things: a speedy web connection, ultra-portability and good battery life?

The funny thing about ultra-portable laptops is that we drop them and leave them places – well I do anyway! So, I think ultra-potable should also mean ultra-cheap.

Because of this I’m WAY more interested in the $299 ASUS Eee PC and $399 CloudBook than the $1,800 MacBook Air.

The Eee only has a 7inch screen and 4GB of memory but it will check Gmail, make Skype calls and update Basecamp projects just as well as any other laptop. It also look pretty easy to mod in some interesting ways and is on sale in Toronto for $299.

The CloudBook has a much bigger 30GB hard drive but isn’t available just yet. Apparently we’ll be able to pick one up from Walmart in a few weeks.

A good friend just bought an Eee so I’ll keep you posted on what he thinks of it. I might not be far behind him.

UPDATE: I had a play on my friend’s Eee this morning. Brilliant! The interface is nice and simple, the keyboard and trackpad work great and the size is mind blowing. It’s called a laptop but this thing only sits on one knee (it’s not big enough to actually sit on your lap!). When the version with the 9 inch screen is released later this year, I’m in.