Technology

Eight inches ought to be enough for anyone!

I can't imagine many people would find this a pleasant device to do any actual work on. Maybe writers on the go, as the author says, though with a dubious keyboard layout even that is questionable.

I remember my 9 inch "netbook." That thing was dope.

I'm down to see this form factor make a comeback, personally.

Urgh. Why do they always have to ramble about AI?

I remember having 10 inch netbook. It was okay for a while, but I would never want to go back to 10 inch display on a laptop. It's just horrible to use. 13 inches is ideal for me =)

I had one of the original netbooks (Asus EEEPC) back in the mid 2000s and I absolutely loved that thing. It was really great for bopping around college and travelling and such and had a killer battery life of like 8 or 10 hours or something like that. I used to run Win 7 dual booted with Ubuntu

My eeePC still works. Installed a touch screen. The battery and power adapter is long gone but it keeps on chugging with a random 12V power supply.

That keyboard layout gave me a stroke. I'd rather relocate Enter than the apostrophe. I suppose that could be remapped...

For awhile now I've been thinking about how nice it would be to have a something like a modern version of the Poqet PC.

The Poqet PC had a much nicer keyboard than the laptop in the article, and between the simplicity of its software and a very aggressive power management strategy (it actually paused the CPU between keystrokes) it could last for weeks to months on two AA batteries.

Imagine a modern device with the same design sensibilities. Instead of an LCD screen you could use e-ink. For both power efficiency, and because the e-ink wouldn't be well suited to full motion video, the user interface could be text/keyboard based (though you could still have it display static images). Instead of the 8088 CPU you could use something like an ARM Cortex M0+, which would give you roughly the same amount of power as a 486 for less than 1/100th the wattage of the 8088. Instead of the AAs you could use sodium ion or lithium titanate cells for their wide temperature range and high cycle life (and although these chemistries have a lower energy density than lithium ion, they'd probably still give you more capacity than the AAs, especially if you used prismatic cells). With such a miniscule power consumption you could keep a device like that charged with a solar panel built into the case.

Such a device would have very little computing power compared to even a smartphone, but it could still be useful for a lot of things. Besides things like text editors or spreadsheets, you could replicate the functionality of the Wiki Reader and the Cybiko (imagine something like the Cybiko with LoRaWAN). You could maybe even keep a copy of Open Street Map on there, though I don't know how computationally expensive parsing its data format and displaying a map segment is.

I used to travel a lot and didn't need a full sized laptop but did need something more powerful than a phone, this would have been perfect. I might get one anyways for transferring files on the go from my cameras.

What they kind of eyes do you people have? I mean, my phone screen is smaller but I'm not doing stuff I would normally do on a desktop or full size laptop.

"Upon picking it up, you can feel the metal chassis has a surprising amount of weight to it."

A surprising amount of weight is exactly what I do not want to feel when picking up a micro laptop.

That being said, it's just a little under the weight of the new 12“ surface pro. Pretty much any bag I have could easily fit a 12" laptop but I imagine it would be hard to get Linux to work well with the surface - especially the touch screen. Not to mention a pretty big price difference.

Either way, it's nice to see more options for small laptops! Maybe in a few years someone will start making small phones again.

Thank you very much!

I need exactly something like that thing! :⁠-⁠D

Something I can just connect to a device to gather logs and don't need to care, that it's lying in the dirt for a few hours.
Currently I need to use my main laptop and I'm always anxious to get it destroyed. Either by dirt/dust or a careless worker in the warehouse.

So this thing seems to be just perfect for such tasks

Can't even express how happy and excited I am now, waiting for that sexy little thing to show up in my mail :⁠-⁠D

But can it play doom 3?

Its very hard to beat the laptop form factor for productivity, but i wish there was more laptops out there with all the ports and hardware features i would like. too bad that some of them are only really available in obscure cyberdecks