http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/laptops/0,39030092,49293507,00.htm
Asus have released the EEE PC, a super mini laptop that only costs £169!
It's 7″ so half way between a laptop and a PDA and it runs on flash memory rather than having a hard disk so it has a really good battery life as well as being super light and it starts up in 30 seconds.
It's fairly low powered so it runs Linux rather than Windows, but the good thing for non techies is that it has been designed to work as an appliance (Like some Nokia phones which also run Linux) rather than a PC so it is set up to “just work” like a Mac with all the things you need like web browsers and word processing on big simple buttons. They do plan to release an XP version. (Which will probably be £50 more and run quite a bit slower!)
The great thing is that Asus have done what Nintendo did with the Wii and ducked out of the arms race of power and graphics and produced a device that does the things that really matter like being small and light and cheap and having good battery life and it will almost certainly be more responsive than a much faster PC running Vista.
I'm quite tempted to get one especially as it would probably be a trivial task to install Xubuntu which would be pretty awesome!