Asus Eee PC

The device does support Windows XP, but Linux seems to be the OS of choice for all of the reviewers for performance and ease-of-use reasons. In this respect, Microsoft has well and truly blown it, because this device is poised to introduce a few million Best Buy shoppers to a pleasantly usable, non-embedded Linux distro. Even more ominous from Redmond's perspective is the fact that the Eee PC is just one of a breaking wave of Linux-powered portable devices that will reach consumers in the coming year, and that it's the hardware makers that are driving the Linux push.

The absence of Microsoft at the recent, mobile-centric Intel Developer Forum was widely commented upon. Intel showed off a raft of ultramobile PC (UMPC), mobile internet device (MID), and smartphone prototypes and mock-ups, all of which were Linux-powered. And why not? Across the company, from the Terascale research initiative to the discrete GPU project to the enterprise power management efforts to the mobile division, every single forward-looking effort at Intel is very much a software effort, and all of those software efforts are Linux- and open source-based.

This is also true of ARM, which is looking to the open source community to provide the free razors that make its blades worth buying. In fact, my most recent briefing on ARM's mobile plans (an article on this is coming soon) was a mirror image of IDF—the form factors and Linux-powered software efforts were largely the same; only the processor hardware was different.

In sum, Linux is now the popular quarterback at the new mobile party, and Microsoft is just that kid who used to be cool back in grade school when tetherball was the hot game and he was king of the pole. If Microsoft wants to break back into the popular crowd, it's going to have to put on something a bit fresher than Windows Mobile 6, which feels like the operating system equivalent of feathered hair and tight-rolled jeans.

The Eee PC's main selling point is its form factor, and it's the form factor that has really blown the reviewers' minds. It seems that the Eee PC is small enough and light enough to attain a truly new level of portability and convenience, while still having just enough screen real estate and keyboard space to be comfortably usable. The result is that reviewers have compared this device's form factor to the UMPC and found the latter wanting.

The balance between size and usability that the Eee PC has struck could well be one that marks a sort of threshold in form factor design. It's likely that the keyboard + WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) paradigm may not be able to shrink any further than the Eee PC's form factor, due to the limits of human dexterity and visual acuity. Anything smaller than the Eee PC will have to be built on a fundamentally different interface paradigm, and no, stylus + WIMP is probably not it. If this turns out to be the case, then there will be a permanent gap in the market between the Eee PC and the Nokia N810.