Asus’ original Eee PC 701 lobbed a hand grenade right at the laptop industry. Sure, it wasn’t perfect: there was no optical drive, the 7in screen was restrictive and it certainly couldn’t match the style of its premium rivals. But here was a fully functional, ultraportable laptop for just $500, a quarter of the price of the Sony VGN-TZ36 (page 36) – as Sony said at the time, “if Asus starts to do well, we are all in trouble”.

The new Eee PC 900 addresses the few complaints levelled at the original. The chassis remains the same size but the major change is that the tiny screen has been supplanted by an 8.9in panel. To make room, the speakers that framed the original Eee’s tiny screen have been moved to the underside of the laptop.

It’s a massive change for the better. Even with the specially tailored installation of Xandros Linux – a Windows XP version is also available, although we’ll discuss the compromises of it later – the new 1024 x 600 resolution is far more manageable, and it provides good image quality too.

A noticeable graininess leaves it trailing the likes of the Sony, but it’s amply and evenly lit, with vibrant punchy colours – it’s enough to make surfing the web an enjoyable experience.

There’s no sign of Intel’s Atom processors yet, so the same 900MHz Celeron processor as before beavers away under the hood. But the memory has risen from 512MB to 1GB, and storage has increased from the original 2GB or 4GB variants to a much more sensible 20GB. The first 4GB of this is the onboard flash memory – still just a shade too small for our liking – with the remaining 16GB coming in the form of a separate internal SSD drive.

Thanks to the solid state disks, the Eee feels fantastically snappy in use. We managed to get some of our benchmarks running under XP, and the 2D graphics and media-encoding segments returned scores of 0.28 and 0.33 respectively – that may not be fast, but considering intensive applications shouldn’t be its primary use, it’s not too bad.

The Eee’s battery life also shows signs of compromise. Sitting idle, with the screen at half brightness and wireless disabled, it lasted just 3hrs 20mins. That the power supply is light comes as some consolation, but we hoped for a little more from such a portable device. On the plus side, though, what hasn’t changed a jot is the Asus Eee’s compactness. It’s incredibly light, weighing less than 1.3kg for both the laptop and charger, making it perfect to sling in your bag on a daily basis.