By the way, here are my specs for a perfect laptop. When I say a small laptop is awesome or crappy, it's pretty much based on how closely it meets these specs.
- Around a 13.3" screen, very bright and sharp (very noticeably bigger than 12", much bigger than the jump from 13.3 to 14.1). I could go as high as 14", but 12" is a little too small to actually get lots of work done. The small Toshiba convertible tablet actually has a 12" SXGA+ screen, I believe-- ludicrous.
- SXGA/SXGA+ resolution (although I concede that for certain work wide-screen might be more desirable)
- The largest, fastest hard drive available
- At least decent dedicated graphics (as someone else said, MR 9000 would be great, although MR 9200 is reputed to have power-consumption and compatibility problems)
- A modular bay, letting you take out the optical drive completely and replace it with a battery or weight saver. If you're not actually loading a program or running a movie off of DVD at the moment, the CD/DVD drive is a horrible waste of space and weight; it's a crappy design decision to have an unremovable optical drive in a small laptop. I'd never be guilty of such bad thought. Even in something like the Panasonic Y2 (I think that's one of the ones with the built-in drive inside the clamshell), they could've allowed for it to be switched out.
- A very light weight, three pounds or less
- Very thin, under one inch thick (lots of "small" laptops are actually quite thick)
- Great battery life, at least eight hours at a usable screen brightness
- A flash card reader. If you have to save your work, this is a great way to keep a 512MB or 1GB storage area for backing up your most important work, and in a way that doesn't drain the battery badly. It's also almost a must if you do lots of photography and want to easily transfer your files without Bluetooth (a battery waster).
- A responsive, well-laid-out keyboard, stretching all the way out to the sides of the laptop to maximize use of space, with around 3mm of key travel and the largest possible keys.
- Great wireless.
- Normal usability stuff, like the right number and accessibility of all I/O ports, quietness, ability to run cool, easy-to-use methods of controlling screen brightness, etc.
- A normal, clean style. Some of the Sonys are godawful ugly ("style", my ass). The current Dell Inspiron blue-and-grey color scheme also gets low marks in this regard; it could only appeal to a Civil War buff or the color-blind.
- Durability. The screen hinge has to stand up to thousands of openings and closings, the keyboard has to be able to take a beating, and the case has to be very stiff (making the new magnesium-alloy and other metal cases very desirable). From this standpoint, the IBM hard drive head-parking system is pretty cool too.
Almost all non-budget laptop models these days offer enough speed for any freak, and up to 2GB of RAM, so those attributes are no longer so important in a purchasing decision, except in how they affect the price.