A little over a week ago, reviews of Asus's Eee PC 701 started to trickle out onto the Internet. Some of the larger publications, like CNet and LAPTOP Magazine got their hands on the unit first, but as it has become more widely available sites like HotHardware and PC Perspective have now put out their own reviews of the Eee PC.

The overall verdict is fairly unanimous: the device's keyboard is a bit cramped, but in terms of price, performance, and features the Eee PC hits the trifecta. Indeed, Asus appears to have gotten so many things right with the Eee PC that it could be a game-changer in the mobile market, in terms of both hardware and software. Instead of rehashing the reviews, which you can read on your own, let me draw a few lessons from the Eee PC launch that I think are important for the mobile space going into 2008.

Intel wins, and Microsoft loses

Thanks to its combination of Intel hardware and a non-bloated Linux install, reviewers found that Asus's little laptop performs just as well as much larger and more expensive Windows notebooks. And the company spent enough time tweaking the unit's default Linux distro that Windows users will supposedly feel right at home.

The device does support Windows XP, but Linux seems to be the OS of choice for all of the reviewers for performance and ease-of-use reasons. In this respect, Microsoft has well and truly blown it, because this device is poised to introduce a few million Best Buy shoppers to a pleasantly usable, non-embedded Linux distro. Even more ominous from Redmond's perspective is the fact that the Eee PC is just one of a breaking wave of Linux-powered portable devices that will reach consumers in the coming year, and that it's the hardware makers that are driving the Linux push.

The absence of Microsoft at the recent, mobile-centric Intel Developer Forum was widely commented upon. Intel showed off a raft of ultramobile PC (UMPC), mobile internet device (MID), and smartphone prototypes and mock-ups, all of which were Linux-powered. And why not? Across the company, from the Terascale research initiative to the discrete GPU project to the enterprise power management efforts to the mobile division, every single forward-looking effort at Intel is very much a software effort, and all of those software efforts are Linux- and open source-based.

This is also true of ARM, which is looking to the open source community to provide the free razors that make its blades worth buying. In fact, my most recent briefing on ARM's mobile plans (an article on this is coming soon) was a mirror image of IDF—the form factors and Linux-powered software efforts were largely the same; only the processor hardware was different.

In sum, Linux is now the popular quarterback at the new mobile party, and Microsoft is just that kid who used to be cool back in grade school when tetherball was the hot game and he was king of the pole. If Microsoft wants to break back into the popular crowd, it's going to have to put on something a bit fresher than Windows Mobile 6, which feels like the operating system equivalent of feathered hair and tight-rolled jeans.

Significant shrinkage

The Eee PC's main selling point is its form factor, and it's the form factor that has really blown the reviewers' minds. It seems that the Eee PC is small enough and light enough to attain a truly new level of portability and convenience, while still having just enough screen real estate and keyboard space to be comfortably usable. The result is that reviewers have compared this device's form factor to the UMPC and found the latter wanting.

The balance between size and usability that the Eee PC has struck could well be one that marks a sort of threshold in form factor design. It's likely that the keyboard + WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) paradigm may not be able to shrink any further than the Eee PC's form factor, due to the limits of human dexterity and visual acuity. Anything smaller than the Eee PC will have to be built on a fundamentally different interface paradigm, and no, stylus + WIMP is probably not it. If this turns out to be the case, then there will be a permanent gap in the market between the Eee PC and the Nokia N810.

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels... Here's to Asus.

If nothing else, the Eee PC could demonstrate that there's a whole device category out that's waiting to be tapped: a wireless laptop that's about the dimensions and weight of a trade paperback or journal (i.e., a large Moleskine), with only solid state storage (no optical drive). If Asus finds the kind of success with the Eee PC that the reviews would seem to indicate, then we'll see the market spit out many more of these diskless devices in the coming year.

I've actually been dying for Apple to release just such a device for about two years now, but the last time I brought it up here at Ars I got flamed by hordes of optical drive lovers(!?). (I can't find a link for this incident, so you'll have to take my word for it.) Maybe now is the time, though, for Cupertino to follow Asus's lead and put some of that massive quantity of flash storage that it has locked up into something besides and iPod or an iPhone.

But regardless of who's next—Apple, Lenovo, Nokia, or whoever—the Eee PC's combination of form factor, performance, and mobile Linux is a prelude of things to come. When Silverthorne and WiMAX debut in 2008, we'll see this category of device take on a whole new level of power and connectivity.