You can't name something after the wind and not expect it to blow.

At what point will el Reg start calling these things Small Expensive Computers? This is now more than twice the price of the original 701.

If they dumped the HDD, used the 16GB SSD as standard and ran it on Linux. I'd buy one in a heartbeat. 8 Hours battery life! Finally, I can go out in the morning and know I will be able to use the thing all day without needing the power block, which is the entire point of a mobile computer in my opinion.

Seriously? The mechanical disk's still fragile even if switched off, and who uses a netbook in a non-mobile situation anyway? Maybe if you paid that much for it, you couldn't afford to own a proper computer too.

Having said that, I'm still very happy with my 701 which I upgraded by fitting a pair of 16gig pendrives internally, software RAIDed don't you know :-) Proper SSD for the OS, cheap pendrives for bulk storage, /var, swap, etc. Lovely and fast too. Oh, and I got a 9 cell battery. Never actually had it run out of juice yet.

Should be bottom left... it really irritates me when they move the CTRL key to bottom left...

I guess it all depends on what you're used to, but having a Mac as my main computer it bloody irritates me moving to other systems... and the " (speech marks) key shouldn't be above the number 2 either as that's just a bit gay.

OMG you're right it has got a strange £ over the 3 too. It is almost as if the UK computer on the UK website with price quoted in GB pounds has a UK keyboard fitted. What numpties.... hash next to the enter key to cap it off... blimey.

Four flippin' hundred and flippin' fifty flippin' quid? That's what I was quoted for a brand new Thinkpad X31 on Tottenham Court Road a week or two ago. Or two perfectly good laptops from Morgan.

The point of the Eee 701 - and I love mine - was that you put up with the low spec for the sake of the low price. How we seem to be expected to pay extra for the low spec.

£450 ain't cheap. Really anything above £300 is not really an SCC. I was really interested right up until the price...

@Scott Mckenzie

Hmm, just checked my Mac keyboard and no Fn key in the bottom left - Ctrl just like every other (non-laptop, 'English') keyboard.

And as for the position of " & @, are you suggesting that the rest of the world should bow down to the US as the superior race? Oh, wait...

Saying that I prefer the US layout, being a righty and prefering a proper sized left shift key. Rather than the crappy little one on UK keyboards, just so they can move \ to make a weird shaped Return/Enter that looks like it belongs on a cash register...

Actually, I reckon that the idea is *really* to be "Readyboost", er, ready for the Win 7 netbook edition launch.

ISTR that Win 7 will use yer actual small SSD as a Readyboost device rather than refusing to countenance anything other than a USB connected device for such, as with its more brain-dead predecessor.

With this setup, they'll have something that can get Win 7 up and running in a sensible time on the otherwise sclerotic hardware.