Did you take in the story about Steven Levy, the Newsweek writer who lost the MacBook Air that Apple loaned him?

It’s so small and thin, he thinks it got thrown out with the trash.

It wouldn’t be such big news whether the MacBook Air didn’t cost within $1,799 and $3,098. In my world, that kind of money buys a decent used car, not a computer. certain, laptops are convenient, but they’re plus easy to break, easy to steal and hard to repair.

Luckily the rest of the action in these “subnotebooks” is on the low end. I’m talking about extremely small laptops like the ASUS Eee PC, the Everex Cloudbook and Intel’s Classmate PC.

For me, the subnotebook became real only in the past couple of weeks with Hewlett-Packard’s announcement that it will soon offer the HP 2100 Mini-Note PC starting at $499.

The Mini-Note weighs about 2 1/2 pounds, has an 8.9-inch screen and a keyboard

described as being 92 percent of full size, something those typing on the tiny ASUS Eee keyboard are bound to appreciate.

The HP Mini-Note features a sturdy aluminum case, extra-durable keys, a mechanism that shuts down the hard drive during sudden movements — like when it’s being dropped — plus built-in wireless and wired networking.

Did I forget to mention that it costs $499? One of the reasons HP can hit such a low price point for the Mini-Note is that the base configuration, like that of the wildly popular ASUS Eee, comes with 512 megabytes of RAM, a 4-gigabyte solid-state flash drive and Novell’s SUSE Linux operating system.

Linux helps the HP Mini-Note, as it does the Eee and the Cloudbook, in two ways. The machines run splendidly with 512 MB of RAM, something a Microsoft Vista-equipped PC cannot do.

One thing lost, though, is a CD/DVD drive. With Linux,…

Orginal post by Top Tech News