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You may have heard a lot about the Kindle which is a small, dedicated machine with a few extras. The Kindle is designed to be the reader for your ebooks purchased from Amazon. You’ll get a discount on the ebooks but with the cost at $399 will take you a considerable period of time to recoup your investment; even with discounts off the latest titles to hit the bookstores.

There is one other major limitation with the Kindle and that is the fact that it is currently only available for distribution within America. The ASUS Eee offers a viable alternative.

The ASUS is a full sub-notebook PC. You have WiFi installed so you can connect to the Internet at any WiFi hotspot in the world. It also includes an Internet browser. Firefox is the browser on the Linux-based one and you will find that is very much better than Internet Explorer. You can call your friends using Skype. The ASUS Eee has integrated microphone and speakers as well as a webcam so there is no need to carry around loads of extras.

So, you have your toothpaste, your cereal bars, suntan lotion and so the list goes on. The final thing would seem to be the digital camera and the portable computer. Why the portable computer? you might ask. Very simple really the screen on the camera is too small to get a good look at the pictures to make sure they will look OK.

Do you really want the hassle? Do you really want to be looking after it all the time? You see the problem is that the value of a computer is not the price you paid for it. It is not even the cost of the software you loaded onto it. It is the price of replacing the data you put into it. Some pictures are irreplaceable.

Some photos that you have kept on your hard drive to remember people or places long gone cannot be brought back. I always tell people taking a portable computer with them on their travels to make two backups of the data.

The first backup is to take with them to restore something that was accidentally deleted. The second backup is to be kept at home so that the data can be recovered again.

The weight, the replacement time and effort and everything else will say don’t take your portable computer with you. Until now there was not really another option. But now you have the ASUS Eee.

It will allow you to look at the pictures you have taken. To clean off the hair or grease that has clouded the lens before it ruins all the holiday snaps. It will allow you to have a copy of the pictures you have taken in case your camera and memory cards are stolen.

The ASUS Eee is small (the maximum screen size is 8.9 inches) and light (less than 2 lbs). The ASUS is not so easily damaged as a conventional notebook as it has a solid-state hard drive. The drive may be small but it is harder to break then the spinning disks of a standard notebook drive.

The ASUS Eee comes with a choice of operating systems either Linux or Windows XP You can have either a Microsoft Works suite or, my preferred set up, the OpenOffice suite. Either will allow you to write using the word process, calculate spreadsheets and perform database transactions. The OpenOffice suite does have the advantage of allowing you to produce presentations and they can be saved either in OpenOffice format or in Power Point (pre-2007) format. I cannot really imagine someone preparing a major presentation on the small screen of the ASUS Eee.

While travelling, the ASUS Eee and a good supply of high capacity memory cards and there you have a recipe for an easier and more enjoyable journey. We do not need to fight our way through airports with a heavy computer. The ASUS Eee is small enough and light enough to use on the airplane while you are flying, but do remember to switch off the WiFi as it may well interfere with the airplane’s systems.

The ASUS will allow you to surf the web and to use Skype to make international phone and computer to computer calls.

So look out for the ASUS Eee and get to realize how much easier it can make your travels. Less stress and more relaxation, isn’t that what every one of us needs?

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