Asus eee: The best toy I've had in years!

A few weeks ago I started using an Asus eee mini-pc. It's a fantastic device that really changes the way I organise my day.
When I received the little cardboard box I was so impatient to open it up that the computer almost dropped to the ground. 5 minutes later I already was posting my first tweet from the tiny keyboard.
For those of you who don't know the Asus eee yet, it's a small 300 € laptop with almost no memory (4GB), a tiny screen (800x480) and a baby-keyboard. But you can't image what a difference this simplicity means. I'll illustrate it with some use cases:

• in a restaurant I opened up the Asus and pulled up a Powerpoint slide to illustrate the point I was making. 30 seconds later I put it away again. This was during lunch, not after it.
• last week I hooked up the Asus to a big HD projector to give a presentation: WOW! The resolution changed to a whopping 1600x1200!
  
• in the car I opened it up to show a website to the passenger. When the lights became green, I closed it up and put it on the dashboard again.
• when going to a meeting, I take notes on the Asus. A normal laptop has the problem that it creates a distance in the meeting. Body language disappears behind the big screen and participants start doing other stuff. Not so with the Asus. The screen is even so small that the other participants can't read what you're typing
• At home, in the couch, in bed or at the dinner table: in these situations you don't want to boot a laptop just to look up something on he web. The Asus fulfills the promise once made by internet tablets. For me those tablet devices never worked. They're just too cumbersome. The Asus is cute and fun to use.

The installed software (a custom Xandros Linux distro, a Debian derivative) fits the bill just nicely: lightweight, yet very complete. Just imagine doing a video call on Skype whilst walking around with this lightweight thing: just amazing! When it comes to the desktop interface: I'm still switching between the easy mode (IceWM with a customized application launcher with big icons) and the advanced mode (a full KDE desktop). I tend to prefer KDE, but that's mainly because I like to organize stuff on the desktop instead of in folders.

Last week a picture of me with the Asus ended up on Flickr. It was instantly taken up in the "geek yoga group". But for me the picture below, taken by my wife, is an even better representation of how I use this computer. Perhaps this yoga position also has a name?