I rarely do Product Reviews in this space, and I'm not sure how many CIOs this is relevant for anyway, but I wanted to rave a bit on my little Asus 2G Surf Eee PC.

As mentioned previously, I'm on an extended sailing trip up the Inside Passage, and while I brought along my trusty, if long in the tooth, Apple Powerbook, I leave it stuffed in it's Tom Bihn case in a dry bag most of the time, because small sailboats are wet. They're also low on spare power, even with the gorgeously sunny weather we've been having up here and the solar panels we have aboard.

Knowing all this would be the case, I went looking for a suitable micro-laptop before we left. I think my first choice would probably have been the XO, but I started shopping just after their buy one/get one offer expired, and Ebay has gone too far downhill for me to trust recently. The Eee PC, with it's low price (replaceability!), low power consumption, and solid state drives, was next on my list.

I got a green one, so it wouldn't disturb any aquatic environments should it go overboard.

It's worked like a champ. As many reviews have noted, the keyboard and mousepad are cramped, but I simply brought along and use full-sized USB mouse and keyboard, which work just fine. One thing I can't do anything about is the small size of the screen, but I find that it doesn't bother me as much as I had expected. I suppose my eyes are still young enough to adjust.

I don't need to be running anything special; my business more or less runs off Google Apps, so the built-in Firefox browser is my main tool. OpenOffice is also installed, which I use when I'm not online at a marina or anchorage.

Though the device is noticeably underpowered, it's counter-balanced in most circumstances by the high-speed access of the solid state drive. The low storage capacity isn't much problem for me with most files stored online, but for anything extra I need I just use a high-capacity USB stick.

I am unaccountably impressed with the device as a business tool so far; I have hardly missed a beat. It's solid, starts up lightning fast, shuts down equally so, and has a childishly simple interface. Given more time before I had to depart, I might have thrown Ubuntu on it instead of the stock, heavily customized version of Xandros it comes with, but when you get right down to it, Debian-based distros are Debian-based distros, and I'm quite comfortable with it once the terminal window is up.

I wouldn't jump out and suggest you outfit your entire organization with them, but for many specialized applications I can see such cheap, rugged little devices coming in handy; on a shop floor, in the field for construction. A Toughbook is sexier, sure, but how many Eee PC's, keyboards, and mice can you pick up for the price of one Toughbook?