Tiny Laptops: HP Mini and Asus EE PC

Tiny laptops seem to making a big splash in the market. It started with the Asus EE PC which, when it first came out had a 7" screen which is pretty cramped and has now come out with a slightly bigger screen to accommodate the user a bit more.

Apparently the demand for this tiny device, which used a flash hard drive and a Linux OS was great enough for HP to raise its head and decide to throw a model in for competition, the HP Mini.

My local Best Buy had both models and I toyed around with them for a little while.


If I had to choose one of the models, I would definitely choose the HP. It seemed, typing away at the keyboard and looking at the hinge that it had a bit more sturdiness to the package which is important for what kind of computer this is.

But what kind of computer IS this? The hard drive on the HP I was messing with was a mere 16gb and neither computer has an optical drive which means that unless you download absolutely everything over the Internet, it will never run as your sole computer. The option isn't even there.

This is surely meant to be a backup computer or travel computer, an auxiliary computer, or to-go computer. A commuter's computer. A web surfer's dream.

The small size means that it can go pretty much anywhere which is handy, especially in my line of work, but the lack of the ability to run as a sole computer is frankly a little disappointing. Everything is going to need to be transferred over to the computer some way or another, whether it be flash drive, or USB port or whatever other method you choose to use.

Out of the box, this is a great computer to lay in bed with and surf the web and type blogs (it would be an amazing computer to blog with). But with only 16gb of space you probably won't be storing your entire collection of music on this, nor will you be storing all of your videos or movies, any libraries of any kind and if you are using it as a student to write papers on, it would probably be smart to save them to a flash drive and import them to your daddy computer. That would be the primary computer, the one with the huge hard drive and disc drive.

However there is a way to make this a primary computer and it would only take a little bit of modification. My proposal would be to make cloth pockets with snaps or Velcro tops so they can be fastened shut. These pockets would be made big enough to fit in an external hard drive and an external disc drive. Hopefully the computer would be wide enough to accommodate the two needed accessories. Also, hopefully neither the hard drive nor the disc drive would require an external power source as well. That way both of them could run off of the computer's power and maintain the, you know, portability of the computer.

Because portability is why you buy this, right?

But then you start thinking of the price and your initial 400.00 investment jumps up to about 600.00 easily with the ability for prices to go even higher.

You have to ask yourself is that TINY laptop with these modification enough to keep you interested when you cross into the threshold of laptops WITH disc drives and non-laughable hard drive space?

All of that space you're saving in your backpack, the low weight of the tiny laptop, that all changes when you get the disc drive and hard drive so it becomes a wash to me. Which would take up less space? The 12" laptop or the 10" laptop with two accessories?

In the end, I would end up going for a normal laptop. I don't require a huge screen and the tiny laptops have always appealed to me but until they can squeeze in a decent hard drive and an optical reader (and maintain some level of ruggedness) I won't be interested in buying one.

Tomorrow, I'll tell you exactly which computer I picked to save up for.