Those little laptops

Last fall, when the Asus Eee PC, a 2-pound, $299 laptop with a 7-inch screen, debuted it made history and created a new niche market for ultra-lightweight and inexpensive PCs, geared to users who mainly want to surf the Web and do e-mail.

It’s a type of computer that some call “netbooks,” with their lightweight, desktop counterparts being known as “nettops.”

The $299 price tag is long gone, but there are a variety of ultra-mobile, low-cost PC offerings from companies including HP, Acer and Lenovo, which are making a strong showing, with prices starting at around $350.

The 2- to 3-pound laptops are appealing because of their weight and price. Downsides include their smaller screens, keyboards and hard drives.

The devices are “more for people who say, ‘I want to have something smaller and lighter that I can carry with me more often than my 6-pound, 15-inch notebook,’ ” said Bob O’Donnell, vice president of IDC technology research firm, in a recent msnbc.com interview.

Some of the little laptops use flash-memory solid-state drives instead of traditional hard drives, which have rotating, magnetic platters.

Solid-state drives weigh less and are heartier and less likely to be damaged than hard drives, both plusses for laptop user on the go. They also cost more per gigabyte than hard drives, but that cost is expected to come down over time.

Attention was drawn to solid-state drives earlier this year when Apple came out with its 3-pound MacBook Air with a 64-GB solid-state drive, as well as a model that has an 80-GB traditional hard drive. The 80-GB model is $1,799. The solid-state model, which started out at $3,098, now sells for $2,598.

Dell is expected to unveil a 12.1-inch, 2.2-pound laptop, the Latitude E4200, that uses a solid-state drive, in the coming weeks. There is no word yet on pricing.

Other major computer manufacturers, including Sony, Acer, Toshiba and Fujitsu, are using solid-state drives as well in laptops. There are also some “hybrid” models, which come with both SSD and hard drives.

Hybrid drives add “very little difference in weight,” said John Rydning, hard disk drive research director for IDC Research. “You’re basically adding one silicon chip onto the hard drive.”

Another plus of a solid-state drive is that it doesn’t eat into a laptop’s battery life the way a hard drive does. And battery life is always something manufacturers are working to improve.

Last week, Dell announced its business-class Latitude E6400 laptop (starting at $1,139), which it claims can run for up to 19 hours without recharging.

The company said it achieved that result, in part, by using a solid-state drive and a larger nine-cell battery (vs. a standard six-cell battery) with the laptop, as well as having an additional battery “slice” attached to the bottom of the computer.