For some people, laptops just arent small enough. Your average laptop weighs 2-3 kilos, and has a fast processor that eats up battery time and produces enough heat to burn your legs if youre not careful. It can be a real effort to work with laptops sometime theyre hardly the dream of portable computing, especially when you have to carry them down the street. Theyre just too big.

Because of this, theres a growing market for even smaller machines, often called subnotebooks, ultraportables or occasionally kneetops. They have screens about the size of the average laptop keyboard, about 10 inches diagonal, and can weight less than one kilo.

So wheres the downside? Well, apart from the fact that the small screen makes it a little hard to see what youre doing, its also very difficult to make the components that small without the computers becoming really expensive. The speed of most subnotebooks is about where laptops were about five years ago an absolute lifetime in computing terms. To get that small, they have to use Pentium M processors, which barely scrape over 1GHz, which is a huge disadvantage when it comes to running a modern operating system like Windows XP.

However, thats not to say that ultraportables are useless theyre just not well suited for every task. If youre doing graphics work, for example, or playing games, or generally doing anything that is heavy on processor power and requires a large screen, then youll probably find these tiny computers to be more frustrating than anything else. If you use your computer like I do, however, mainly for web browsing, email and word processing, then youll find that ultraportables are more than capable of doing those jobs very well indeed, with far less inconvenience than a full-size laptop creates.