A little-known Taiwanese firm that makes motherboards for brand-name PCs has put its own moniker on one of the lightest, sleekest, cheapest laptops ever to connect to cyberspace.

Today, Asus Technology will unveil a $299 version of the Eee PC, a 2-pound laptop that stores data on flash memory, not a hard drive, and runs Linux, the open-source operating system, rather than Windows or the Mac OS.

Instead, these Internet-ready gizmos come loaded with free software to browse the Web, do word processing and create spreadsheets - just like their $399 predecessors that Asus launched in Taiwan in October.

Ever since, the little-known giant - Asus is arguably the world's largest maker of motherboards and a leading laptop vendor - has been scrambling to keep pace with the viral interest in this no-frills, hardworking box.

The PC, loaded with open source software, is available at two prices:

-- $299 for 256 megabytes of memory and 2 gigabytes of storage
-- $399 for 512 megabytes of memory and 4 gigabytes of storage

More Here

Also: Jono Bacon: Small Is Beautiful