New generation of laptops is literally child's play

It's about the size of a paperback book and fits in an overcoat pocket. Photo / Supplied

For some months, strange goings-on have been reported in branches of Britain's Toys "R" Us. Middle-aged men and younger males sporting ponytails and Grateful Dead T-shirts have been observed leaving the premises with small cardboard boxes which they then gleefully tear open upon reaching the safety of their cars.

Exclamations of "Yes!" and "Yeehaw!!!" have been heard by security guards, who are as puzzled by all this as their checkout colleagues. "I can't figure it out," said one store manager, when quizzed by this columnist a few months ago. "The things are just walking out of the store. They sell out the minute we get a delivery."

"They" refers not to a cuddly toy, but to the ASUS EeePC, a small sub-notebook computer made in Taiwan. It's small and light enough - about the size of a paperback book - to fit in an overcoat pocket. It has an 18cm screen, a small but fully-equipped keyboard and boots up in a few seconds - partly because it has no hard drive. It does, however, have two USB ports which can take flash drives, connect to printers etc, plus a VGA port for connecting up an external monitor, an ethernet socket for hooking up to local area networks or broadband modems, a built-in camera, microphone and wi-fi.

The EeePC, which was designed for children, has found its market niche among adults. This tells us a lot about the state of the computer industry.

The device is designed to be an information appliance rather than a computer per se. It runs Linux but you don't have to know that because it comes pre-configured: you switch it on and there it is. What you see are tabs labelled with words like "internet", "work", "learn", "play", and so on.

Click on "internet" and up come icons for web mail, web, Messenger, Skype, Wikipedia and Google Docs. Click on "web mail" and you get icons for Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail. Click on the "work" and you get OpenOffice - the Open Source equivalent of Microsoft Office.

The key thing about the ASUS machine - and the reason for its popularity - is that it bypasses most of the complexity of operating a standard computer.

To see whether it really could replace my Apple laptop, I took the EeePC with me on a recent trip abroad.

When we arrived at the destination I plugged the ASUS machine straight into our hosts' broadband modem and in seconds was on the net.

Later in the same trip I noticed that a friend was online in Spain, so clicked on the Skype button and in seconds was engaged in a video call with him. Everywhere I went, it picked up the available wireless networks without fail.