I got myself an Asus Eee PC yesterday. It's part of the new breed of Ultra Mobile PCs (UMPC) and is probably the most successful one so far. I've seen them on various websites and thought they looked cool but I wasn't moved to buy one. Then I had a go in a shop last week and was bowled over at how small, light and how easy to use it was. I've already got a Nokia N800 and use it to keep in touch with my sites when I am away from home, but when I saw the Eee PC and realised I could have a similarly sized mobile solution but with the added benefit of an actual QWERTY keyboard and at a very cheap price, I decided to give it a go.

This thing is so easy to use, and so affordable, it's easy to envisage it and similar devices gaining serious traction in the market place. The Eee PC is getting lots of publicity at the moment and it's quite feasible to imagine it becoming a breakthough machine, crossing over from the geek gadget territory into a new cheap access way to access the web, perfect for travellers, students, kids and lots of other people.

Let's not forget also the XO Laptop, part of the One Laptop per Child program which should see millions of 800x600 sized devices distributed to the developing world.

In recent years, typical desktop monitors have got increasingly bigger so that many site builders will make sites with a minium of 1024x768 sized screens in mind, thinking that 800 x 600 size screens are from a bygone age and can be ignored. There's always been "other" devices with small or different screen sizes but designers might have considered that they were a small enough percentage not to worry about. If ultra mobile PCs like the Eee PC - which has a 7" 800 x 480 screen - carve out a significant market share, it might be that web designers have to think again about their layout strategies and revert back to smaller screen designs or better still, fluid layouts which don't break on any display system or require users to horizontal scroll.

Labels: web design