It's time for me to buy a new laptop, the old one having gone well past the point of pension.

There was a time when I would simply have bought the lightest Toshiba I could afford, but things have become so much more confusing since I last pried open my wallet, dodged the moths, and bought a Portégé.

As my colleague Daniel Robinson points out in his latest video review, the lightweight end of the notebook market is currently undergoing a schism. While some ultraportables I'd like to own are the wrong side of two grand, you can now also find low-spec subnotebooks with very low prices. These can even be had under a kilo and under £350, in the shape of the latest Asus Eee PC 900.

Interest in Asus's wee beastie is acute - at our recent Channel Expo show, quite a few of the attending resellers were huddled in the Asus stand and keen to see the Eee in action with its new and bigger screen. It's not often that an 8.9-inch screen is considered bigger, such was the pixie-sized nature of the older 7-inch Eee PC 701.

Despite its low RRP, there is still an attractive margin to be made on the 900 model. Asus has clearly worked miracles in its own supply chain to keep the wholesale price so low.

Lovely as the Eee PC is, I found the keyboard too small for my not-very-fat fingers. I couldn't touch-type reliably, which rules it out, sadly.

I got on better with HP's 2133 Mini-Note, which boasts a slightly larger keyboard. This is about the smallest keyboard on which I can comfortably type without errors, although it would no doubt be bad for the wrists. In the office I use a split ergonomic keyboard, but the Mini-Note would be OK for short bursts.

But while my wrists might get by, I'm not sure my eyes would. The Mini-Note's 1280x768 screen is crisp and colourful, but each pixel seems about the size of an ant's toenail. System fonts show up in hair-fine lines. It's just about useable for my ageing eyes, but I would prefer something with the same physical screen size and a lower pixel count - the 1024x600 screen on the Asus, in fact, would be ideal.

I can't hang around waiting for someone to marry the Mini-Note keyboard with the Eee PC's screen, so I guess I will have to buy something completely different.

Having said that, I've just sent back to Acer a 17-inch, desktop replacement behemoth that I've enjoyed using on long-term test. I loved the screen and keyboard on that. Now, if only someone could offer a 17-inch screen with a lightweight chassis that doesn't cost an arm and a leg...