Barry Fox

Gary Shapiro, head of the Consumer Electronics Association in America which stages the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and saw off Comdex, justifies the topsy-turvy growth of the sprawling event: “The beauty of shows is that anyone with an idea and very little money can be exposed. Bill Gates succeeded because of Comdex.”

I thought about this when I was doing what I always do when attending CES; taking advantage of the fact that not even the exhibition’s staff can decode the crazy aisle and booth numbering system, getting lost on the show floor and letting serendipity take over.

One small stand was showing equipment from the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project. This will give children in developing nations a chance to learn IT skills and communicate. It has been viewed by some adults in developed nations as a sneaky cheap option for business use.

Now I don’t think so. The tiny keys will remind those with long memories of the early Sinclair computer keypads, once famously described as like shaking hands with a dead man. OLPC really is for children.

Not far away another small booth was demonstrating the Asus Eee PC, which will remind the same long-memoried of the first real portable PC, the wonderfully easy-to-use Tandy TRS-80 Model 100. A4 size, the 100 had a solid-state operating system from Microsoft in pre-DOS and Windows bloat days, a feelgood keyboard, small mono LCD screen and built-in modem (300bits/sec!). It switched on and off at the flick of a slider and ran for weeks on AA cells.

Compare that to a modern laptop with Windows which takes the first half of a plane trip to boot up, the other half to shut down and drains its rechargeables while doing so.

The Eee PC is half the size of most notebooks, weighs less than 1kg, is solid and comes with quick-boot Linux built to look like Windows. The keyboard is small but usable by adults.

Airport security is making it increasingly difficult to carry a full-sized laptop as hand luggage. So the first thing I did when I got back to the UK was go out with £220 to buy an Eee PC. But even before PCW’s rave reviews had hit the newsstands, every shop and website had completely sold out and PC World was not even taking orders.

I solved my problem by buying an end-of-line Packard Bell Easynote, which is around the same size and weight as an Eee PC, costs (on special offer) around £350 and is blessed with Windows XP rather than Vista. It’s slow but lets me escape the clutches of Vista. So my working tool’s Windows software still works.