The Asus Eee is an ultra-mobile laptop that packs very little power in a very little body. WIth a low price point ($399.99), you would expect not to get too much, and you would be right. But for all that it is lacking, there are some good things to be said from this 2-lb wonder. Is it functional? Is it practical? Read on to find out.

With the Windows XP operating system as the resident OS, the Asus Eee has 512 MB of RAM installed. XP needs a minimum of 128 MB, so this is fine. There is no internal hard drive; instead, the Eee has 4 GB of flash storage, of which 3 GB is taken up by XP. On the right side is a SD card slot to add "hard drive" space. So with an 8 GB card, you can store some of your lower-size files. Don't expect this to hold all your music and movies, add an external hard drive to one of the three USB ports.

Running the ship is an Intel Celeron M processor. What? Yes, those are still in use apparently. Despite the Celeron, it maxes out at 900 Mhz, which isn't bad since it's only running XP, which isn't a processor hog. Some of the programs you may run on the Eee may slow down the computer, but of the 5 programs/games that were test, the processor handled fine.

Since there is not optical drive, you will need to take up another of the USB ports with an external DVD/CD burner/reader if needed. The Eee has built-in wireless as well as a 10/100 Ethernet port and a VGA output for hooking it up to a monitor.

The screen is LCD and Widescreen, which shows up well for being 7". You will do a lot of scrolling up and down plus left and right when viewing large web sites or big documents. The speakers, which are located on either side of the screen are stereo and do the job.

Booting the system up required about 20 seconds, due to the nature of XP and the amount of start-up programs needed. Running Microsoft Office was speedy and opening three and four programs at once was handled very well by the Eee. Where it slowed a little was running the wireless and opening up graphic intensive websites. Internet Explorer chugged along with slight delays between clicks. Sims was tested and ran fine except when the screen was chocked full of action. This is probably due to the 64 MB shared video card that runs the graphics.

The biggest downside to the Eee is the keyboard. Your hands will feel giant as they hover over the keys. Most fingers will cover two keys at once, making you type two letters on the screen. This got annoying after awhile and might be a deal breaker for some.

The Asus Eee is a great computer for a kids' first computer or if you need something basic to check e-mail and surf the Internet. It is meant to be portable so carrying an external optical drive and an external hard drive defeats the underlying purpose of a laptop. If you are looking for more, then spend the extra $100 or so and get something quicker with those standard features. But if you don't need to store anything or burn anything or play games, then the Asus Eee might just be for you.

It's interesting to note that you can also get the Eee with Linux installed and with a slightly slower Celeron processor, which brings the laptop price down abut $50 more.

You can almost put it in your pocket.