Mannerisms

Of course any machine costing half the price of the competition is admirable while screen size, external dimensions and weight remain pretty much the same.

However the Elonex’s SSD, at 1GB, is half the size of the lowest-spec Asus (2G, 4G and 8G), and the processor speed on the Elonex, at 300MHz is about a third of that of the 1GHz Celeron M used by the Asus.

Elonex call their tiny laptop One. Asus, of course, calls theirs eee.

The whole trend to these tiny devices seems to have been kicked off by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) programme of MIT, copied by Intel’s Classmate.

Designed for children in poor countries, it seems the OLPC/Classmate type of laptop is eagerly in demand by Western consumers, with the eee’s production constantly running short of demand.

That Intel got so competitive about its Classmate, causing outrage in the OLPC camp, was probably because it saw this emerging class of laptop as a threat.

After all, if the world decided to use tiny, cheap laptops running Linux using low-power processors like ARM, then Intel could have been cut out of this new class of laptop.

This is the thinking behind Intel's launch of its 'Atom' processors. They are designed to run Windows on this new class of laptop.

The Atoms may have the disadvantage of having ten times the power consumption of an ARM, but the Atom can run Windows which ARM can't.

So Intel is responding in its own way to a new challenge. 'Only the paranoid survive', was the watchword of Intel's great former CEO Andy Grove.

It may be arrogant, it may screw up most of its attempts at diversification, but the good news for Intel's continued survival is that paranoia still stalks its cubicles.