The Unlawyer

My old, beloved IBM ThinkPad X31 was diagnosed to be beyond economic repair the other day. As you can well imagine, I was shocked to find out that replacing its broken motherboard will cost far, far more than what I bought it for some three and a half years ago. Now it’s time to put this faithful machine out of its misery after I take out its hard drive, memory module, and Wi-Fi radio, not to mention its AC adapter and a slightly-used battery.

So, I’m in the market today for an ultraportable laptop to replace this machine.

Let see: a Lenovo ThinkPad X300? Very nice but too expensive. A MacBook Air? I’ll be going against my own advice if I buy it today and even if I want one, I will have to pay for it in advance and wait another two weeks for delivery, although I must say that it actually costs less than what I paid for my late X31 all those years ago.

Unfortunately, all those features – light weight, small size, bragging rights – that add up to an ultraportable’s portability come at a steep price.

Then, I thought about the uses I put my laptop to when I’m on the road: communicating via email and IM, composing the odd memo or contract, surfing the World Wide Web, reading RSS feeds, writing blog entries, downloading pictures from my digicam; all lightweight jobs that don’t need the processing power of a full-fledged mobile computer.

Nowadays, it looks like I may not need one to do all that: enter the Asus Eee PC.

I’m not that unfamiliar with Asus portable computers: one of my earliest blog entries was about the Asus A3400L laptop. I am, on the other hand, less familiar with the Eee, having ignored this machine since it was introduced late last year. At the time I still had the use of an ultraportable, so I felt no need to find out more about the Eee.

I won’t bother blogging about the specs of this machine. I do, however, want to know what do users have to say about the Eee. Take Stephen Bainbridge, who appreciates its small size and solid feel – hey, no fragile hard drive to worry about. Closer to home, Leigh Reyes photographed her Eee with a bag of chips to emphasize its portability. Tonyo Cruz says the Xandros-equipped Eee quickly boots and is pre-installed with many useful applications.

What’s not to like about the Eee? A small screen and keyboard, although a 9-inch Eee is just around the corner. Limited built-in storage, although it can be expanded by the simple expedient of installing a SD memory card or by mounting an external hard drive. No Bluetooth for my smartphone-cum-wireless modem.

The clincher? The Eee is pretty cheap, less costly than some of the mobile phones I have been hankering for lately, and certainly cheaper than the Nokia E90 Communicator I want but can’t quite justify buying.

Decisions, decisions: should I buy the 7-incher today or wait for the 9-incher later this year?

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In the Philippines, the the price of the Asus Eee PC 4G is PHP 19,800.00. The Asus Eee PC 8G, with its 1 GB of memory and 8 GB of solid-state storage, is not officially available here, not yet anyway, but I have been told that this model will be introduced in the Philippine market later this month.