Yesterday I spent quite some time into researching something that interested me for a while - tiny laptops. Not for myself to have, but because there is something I don’t get.

Telephone manufacturers tried to create devices that would be between a laptop computer and a phone. Palm had a device prepped that was slashed only days before it’s release, which was aimed at reporters and supposed to be the ideal device to go with your treo. HTC has a laptop wannabe that is so ugly that you run out of the store before you have died of a heart attack after having seen the absurd price (called the HTC Shi(f)t), and some others are out there.

But the latest trend is all about the mini laptops, ultra-portables or whatever you’d like to call them. And guess what? There are quite a few of them out there, more than you’d think, and they’re pretty cool.

Asus is the leader of the pack with the EEE series mini laptops. There are different flavors, but if you look at this particular one in the image below, you are looking at a sweet one. All mini laptops feature wifi, about 50% of them run some kind of adapted linux which downs the price and is pretty stable and virus free, which makes these devices very useful as “netbooks”.

Most of them have flash for storage, so no mechanical parts, from which the battery life benefits, but this also makes the mini laptops robust. Although there are many asian copies out there at sweet prices, I can tell you that the Asus EEE Pc 4G is probably the best for the price. It goes home with you at a sweet Eur 249 (about $373), and does about expected. Perfect for kids, right?

So what are tiny laptops? They’re sweet.

Available in the Netherlands from Laptopshop.nl (Coolblue) at a sweet Euro 249