Only thing about this blog post is I doubt the 10″ version will come out – the 7″ is really great and I didn’t think it would be this easy to use!

I’ve been eying the Toshiba L30 and L40 series, but both are still in the $800 area when configured with decent amounts of RAM.

The T23 is a little bigger than what you’ve been looking at, but IBM also did the X40 which is very lightweight and will be reaching the end of it’s lease lifetime at a lot of places. (Though IIRC some of those have a motherboard defect which kills them, so I’m not sure how many will actually be surfacing on the used market, and I wouldn’t suggest going that route if you can’t get some kind of extended warranty that would cover it for at least a year.)

The #1 laptop I’ve ever had was a Hitachi Visionbook, and despite the fact that by current standards it had all the processing power of plankton and weighed a ton, it was virtually indestructible, eminently reliable, and all around a fantastic little machine. It was a P2 350 w/ 136 MB Ram (originally it had 40 IIRC, the weird number comes from having 8 on board plus what’s in the slot). I used to run OpenBSD w/ Fluxbox on mine; it installed like a charm when Debian balked. It was slow, of course, but I was actually using it up until about a year ago for email, IM, and the web. It was also fine as a terminal to something bigger and better. Unfortunately I think Hitachi is only selling in Japan now. If they still have the same kind of quality, I’d probably love another of those even more than the Thinkpad.

Sry. I digress.