last paragraph: lower = higher - sorry for the mistake

These kind of comments from Sony are really inapropriate. Who are they to say what is good for the industry? The industry is there for one purpose only - to fulfill the needs of the customer. If it turns out that the customer wants a cheaper, less powerful machine then it only means that the next step will be to reduce the costs instead of trying to fill a notebook with HD optical drives and multicore processors. There will always be a market for this kind of computers. Personally I enjoy using powerful hardware, even if it means I have to spend more - a lot of people feel the same.

The main goal of a company should be to create hardware that people want to use/buy, not to dictate what they believe is the next best thing. I think the Eee PC is a wondeful idea - I'm a college teacher in Poland (where students are far less wealthy than in the US) and I see a tremendous potential for such devices. Finally a well built notebook that the average student can afford, and it comes with preinstalled OpenOffice - great!

This statement from Sony sounds really pretentious - is it such a bad thing that customers will buy a less powerful machine that suits their needs? Should they save for another few months just to have an overpriced Vaio on which they will perform the very same tasks (granted, at a lower speed)?

If your only way to show you're not a fanboy is to state what consoles you own then you pretty much already lost the argument. But then again who cares, we are on the Internets.

It will be replacing a Tissot T-Classic Desire

There is also another potential problem with this - there are still many countries in which you cannot create an iTunes account. I happen to live in one of them and right now I'm very dissapointed.