Something extraordinary has happened in the market for portable PCs over the past year: a new category of devices, tagged variously as ultra mobile PCs (UMPCs), netbooks or mini-notes, has emerged. It was Taiwan-based Asus that launched the new sector when it brought out the first EeePC models and took many of the biggest makers of laptops by surprise in the process.

The most recent netbooks are cute and some, like Hewlett-Packard’s Vivian Tan Mini 1000 model, are even fashionable. Anyone who remembers an earlier generation of small laptops, dubbed sub-notebooks and UMPCs (Ultra Mobile PCs), should realise that these latest netbooks may be similar in size and form but they are substantially more powerful and are built around a raft of new technologies.