Smallest Laptop Computer

What is the smallest laptop computer?

The answer to this question depends on where you draw the line to call an electronics device a laptop computer.

• If you think a laptop computer is a machine you can carry around, surf the net, download music and videos, get your e-mail, and maybe do some minimal word processing, then the answer is-- a properly equipped smart phone or PDA.
• If you think a laptop computer should do all these things, run multiple Microsoft Office applications and view the videos without distortion, then the answer is-- a 12 or 13 inch ultra-portable notebook computer.
• If You think a laptop computer can be somewhere between these, then a net book or a mini laptop is your answer to, "What is the smallest laptop computer?"

I'm not going to talk about phones here. While they are approaching the point where the traditional tasks that people have done on computers are possible on some of them, they aren't there yet. The blurring comes in because what most people primarily do with their laptop computers today aren't these traditional tasks. These are e-mail, downloading, surfing the net, and light word processing (letters or e-mails).

For these purposes, net books or mini-laptops are the smallest laptop computers. They look like notebooks. They have the folding top with the screen in it and the keyboard and pointing device on the lower section. They do a lot of the things that anyone would use a laptop for, and for a lot of people, 90% of the time they won't want or need more computer.

To protect themselves from unhappy customers who might get annoyed enough not to buy from them again, most sellers of mini-laptops try to say up front that the net book is not suitable to be a primary computer, but are a secondary, more portable and convenient device for e-mail and web-browsing.

I agree with them.

Having said that, restricting myself to machines with Intel Atom or newer Via Nano processors, the smallest net book I was able to find (without going blind searching) was a "mbook" from a Korean company called UMID. It has a 4.8 inch WSVGA (1024X600) display, 512 MG ram, a 16GB (and possibly a 32 GB) SSD drive and Linnux (didn't say what version) or Windows XP. According to AVING, it is only available in Korea and costs 600000 to 700000 Won-- a little over $399 to a little over $466 US dollars. It is about 6.22 X 3.70 X .73 inches in size. (These aren't exact, I converted from millimeters).

In the U. S. the smallest netbooks seem to be the 7 inch Assus at 8.66 X 6.46 X 1.4 inches or the 8 inch Sony at 9.7 X 4.7 X .8 inches. The more common 8.9 inch mini-laptops cluster around 9.75 X 6.75 X 1.5 inches in size. Again it looks like very few brands make their own machines, so the differences are cosmetic -- you will pay more for look and feel.

In my personal opinion, for the type of use I put a computer to, the smallest laptop computer is a 12 or 13 inch laptop with a main-line AMD or Intel Core 2 Duo processor and a WXGA (1200 X 800) display. These will be roughly 12-13 X 9 X 1.5 inches.

But,I'd probably get something bigger because it is hard to get a discrete graphics card in a laptop computer this small.

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