I used a Sony X505 for years. It was gorgeous, this was in 2006 or so, and netbooks were unknown of course. Everyone loved it and it was tiny and slipped into a case. And expensive: $3,000. And the screen was 10" and the HDD was 20GB and the battery lasted for 60 minutes.

Still I loved it, until one day it just stopped. No power, no life. Finito. "Sony, can you repair my arm and leg of a machine?" "Sorry, no."

Sony may make lovely machines but they got me good on that X505 and I will never buy one of their products as long as I live.

I have the smaller version, from Brando, and it works very well for carrying and shooting street-level shots (zoom, aim and shoot without looking, after a while I'm very accurate with it). It's not comfortable for a more classic dual-hand landscape grip since the wrist can't twist up. In large cities, it secures your camera so no petty thief can grab it and run off.

@Louisville: if you're watching the KIRF game you'll realize that what's missing from the home-grown market is the ability to make new designs. This is what Dell brings and they can capture a large chunk of the Chinese market by mixing their design and experience with the KIRF production chain. They are fighting HTC on this. They would have gone earlier but this is going to so annoy Microsoft that they had to wait until it was inevitable.

Side-effect: a new wave of Dell break-away (from MS-X86) netbooks running ARM + Android. China is the testing ground and first market, then India, Brazil, Africa, and then Europe and the USA last of all. Well, maybe Africa last of all, as usual.

Android. It's all about Android. Dell is going to be one of many big name firms producing mobile phones first for BRIC, and then for the rest of the world. Lenovo, Acer, Asus, HTC, and then a hundred little Guandong hardware shops.

First down, Windows Mobile. Next down, Symbian. End game is Apple vs Android.

It's the year of Linux, just not quite the way everyone expected.

I have a Dana and used it for a couple of years as my main writing machine. It has perhaps the best keyboard I've ever used in 30 years, and is very robust. The small screen is painful but works. It runs for 20 hours on a rechargeable set of 3 x AA batteries. In theory it also runs Palm OS software but there are no apps for the Dana's widescreen. And it has SD slot expansion so a $1 512MB SD card gives me room for years, decades of writing. It works as a USB keyboard so although there is random to/fro software for Windows, the simplest way to upload text is to open an editor on a real PC, plug in the Dana, and press "Play", and it re-types the current document into the editor.

Downsides: when the battery runs out, it loses everything and mysteriously also wipes the external SD card. Not nice.

It's 2x the size of my Eee 1000 so lost favor as my main writing machine. I'm keeping it for my daughter for when she starts to type.

@redcard: no, I suspect you really don't get it. It's not about alternatives to DVD, it's about not putting 1995's technology in 2009 machines, and about participating in the real world, even if on a bus.

Hey, I have a collection of 1,200 CDs, all in good condition, each holding ~650MB of real digital music. Want to buy them? What, you don't like the idea of playing music off CDs? You prefer those 25,000 songs on your iPod? Well, obviously you're cheap, if not an outright crook!

@redcard: true, but I prefer to talk to people than watch movies, on a bus. DVDs are anachronistic. I have an SD card that holds 16GB. My DVD collection was destroyed by my kids, years ago, and I left it at that. Dead plastic is not worth the purchase. When I took my daughter on a long train trip last week, she could have watched DVDs on a portable player. Instead she drew and talked to people and slept.

Hey, just my 5c, I'm still waiting for a netbook that does it right, and this one ain't that.

"Purchase the media they watch"? Ah, you mean for movies and such? I was referring to updates of Eeebuntu. Movies are more fun in the cinema, or on a large screen. Plus, TV does not come on DVDs except late, and arbitrarily. As it is, I watch the Colbert Report online, which is good enough.

I've not used a DVD in years. Five years, or more. Everything I need comes via Bittorrent and zapped onto USB keys.

Why would anyone want to carry around this useless weight. Add extra battery, or remove thickness, and extend the screen to eliminate that stupid bezel, without increasing the external dimensions of the machine. Then I'll take two, please.

I'm using the brando HD media player. About half the cost and seems to play everything. Plug in a hard drive, USB stick, SD card, and get out HDMI or A/V. Pretty neat, small. It's a bit weird using 1TB hard drives like floppies, but it does work.