The MacBook Air is without doubt a beautiful machine, but a lot of its appeal derives from a canny visual trick: gradually beveled edges. It looks a lot thinner than other ultraportables, but there isn't much difference. The back of the laptop is 0.76" thick, the front after the beveling a quarter inch less.

The screen is actually big enough that the laptop doesn't look small. When the screen stretches 13", as it does with the MacBook Air, you'd want a paper-thin body. But this body is just beveled more subtly. IMO subnotebooks like the Asus Eee look sexier because they're absolutely tiny. (That's not to claim their fit 'n finish is as pretty.)

The MacBook Air's screen is highly reflective, which is painful when you're near a window. Apple doesn't offer a matte screen for this model. The machine's keyboard is chiclet style, and low-profile with little travel and an unsatisfying feel. On CPU, the laptop is pretty but expensive and gutless, like an early PT Cruiser or Mazda Miata.

Buying upgrades from Apple is like getting your car serviced at the dealer: expect a steep markup. On the Air, you pay $300 for a minor CPU speed bump from 1.6 to 1.8 GHz. That's the cost of a whole new Asus Eee subnotebook, a complete 3.0 GHz processor, a 1.5 terabyte hard disk and so on.

I once ran into a Toshiba exec on an airplane who quietly showed me a gorgeous little subnotebook not yet released in the U.S.: the Libretto. For the next few years the only way to get a fully-functional PC that size -- half the size and weight of a notebook, running standard Windows programs -- was to fork out double the cost of a regular laptop for something like a Fujitsu Lifebook.

So Asus' hugely popular Eee subnote, which runs Vista, XP and Linux for $300, is a game changer. The machine itself is light and adorable, little bigger than a paperback. You could throw it into a backpack for an afternoon of surfing at a café without thinking twice. Sure, its 7" screen is a bit small. The original has wide black bezels on both sides, placeholders for the new model with a 10" screen.

But the real sticking point is the keyboard. With smaller keys than usual, it falls between thumb keyboards and full-size standard ones. I've spent some time typing on the Eee, and even when using only the tips of my fingers, it definitely crimped my typing speed.

Here's a possible solution. Back in Palm Pilot days, I used a full-size keyboard which folded into a 'w' shape and was little bigger than the Pilot in its carrying case. The Stowaway keyboard was comfortable, fast to type on and relatively cheap. On plenty of overseas trips, I took notes with the keyboard and my Palm V rather than bringing a full-size laptop.

Right now the barrier is that the 'w'-shaped Stowaway keyboard seems to come mainly with Bluetooth -- the USB version is hard to find -- and the Eee has to be hacked to support Bluetooth. Portable keyboards which support USB generally don't fold. The closest I've found so far is the Matias folding keyboard, which supports USB. Another option is the TabletKiosk USB folding keyboard, which is smaller because it omits the number pad.

But I still haven't found a 'w'-shaped USB keyboard which accordions into something tiny. So I'll probably track down a used USB Stowaway.

Eee User discusses this here and here.

At 2 am one recent morning, I uploaded an 8x10 family photo and a few 5x7's to a drugstore chain's web site. At 7 am they emailed to say the photos had come out of the printer at the local store. By 9 am, lo and behold, there they were.

They should take it to the next logical step: just let users print to the big machine as if it were a local photo printer. It should be: File / Print to > My local drugstore.