I’m currently on the lookout for a good laptop for my wife. I’m planning to buy her a new one as a Mother’s Day gift even if I might get it at the end of the month.

Right now, I’m torn between the ultraportability of an ASUS EEE or the decent computing power of an ACER laptop. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve fallen in love with the EEE’s small form factor. I know my wife will love the fact that she can bring it with her in her various meetings and during her brainstorming sessions with her staff. But I am also considering getting her an ACER with a decent graphics chip. I am proud to say that my wife is also a gamer and she has been complaining that she hasn’t had the time to play her favorite RPGs and simulations. A budget gaming PC will be something she will definitely appreciate.

There are just so many choices right now. I think I’ll need a couple more weeks before I arrive at a decision.

I whipped out my ASUS EEE at a meeting this week for a new project I’m working on. As expected two of my teammates got intrigued by the diminutive size of the machine and got more surprised when I told them how much it costs. A few days later, at another meeting those two approached me to say that they are going to buy an EEE in a couple of weeks. I told them it’s a good investment but they might want to hold off for a few more weeks because the 900 series is already available. The two said that they’ll think about it.

My last conversation with them actually left me wondering, too. With the 900 series available, the lure of the bigger capacity and screen size is really something that will make you take pause. But the attendant price increase is the one niggle that is not really sitting well with me. With the new price point for the 900, you can get a full featured budget laptop for the same price. ASUS may have forgotten that the price point is one of the biggest selling factors for getting an EEE. By eliminating that advantage, the EEE is shown for what it really is, a low featured laptop.

I hope that ASUS gets its act together especially when they announce the release of the Intel Atom EEEs.

I’ve been bringing along my ASUS EEE in all of my meetings. It’s been a constant companion to the point that I never leave home without it. Even when I go out for errands, I never forget to bring it with me in the hope that during a lull in my day I can catch up on some work or just surf at leisure.

One limitation of the EEE is the battery power. I can only squeeze up to two and half hours of power on the stock battery. This is not enough especially for a power user like me. It’s a good thing that ASUS has started selling spare batteries at relatively affordable prices. I love the fact that the company has released heavy duty batteries that give up to four and half hours of power. That’s enough juice for me to last the whole day.

I’ve already placed my online order for a battery, between this new one and my stock battery, I’m pretty much set.

Whenever I get cabin fever from working too much inside my house I would often bring my laptop, go to coffee shop and work from there. Free hotspots have really helped in making me more productive. Of course, productivity can only happen when there is an existing hotspot near you.

I discovered this limitation when I decided to accompany my wife in one of her errands as a magazine editor. She needed to visit a number of commercial shops and look for items that can be featured in her magazine. Hoping that this would be a great way to spend some time with her while at the same time catch up with work, I decided to join her. The plan was for her to walk around these establishments while I go look for a coffee shop where I can work. Good idea, right?

It wasn’t. The commercial area we went too didn’t have a hotspot and the one area that did have Wi-Fi was restricted to subscribers of a Wi-Fi service. I was well and truly screwed. This incident really drove home the convenience of having a ready internet connection wherever you go. Subscriptions to a Wi-Fi service is really not a good idea because it is still dependent on an available hotspot. This made me really see the value of HSDPA based internet connections. With just a small gadget plugged to your lappie, you can access the internet literally wherever you are — in the car, in the middle of a mall, even on the beach! As long as the area is within range of a mobile network you’ve got internet.

With the level of mobility that my work requires from me especially in the near future HSDPA will give me the productivity edge that I need.

There are rumors flying around that IBM is about to take over AMD. The rumor has gained added strength because AMD’s stocks actually rose on these rumors.

I personally think that an IBM takeover will be quite far fetched — if not near impossible. IBM just doesn’t have hardware as a priority at this point. It is moving away from hardware and focusing on software and IT solutions. Over the years, the company has unloaded a lot of its hardware assets — the laptop business was sold to the Lenovo Group, the disk drive business to Hitachi, and just last year the printer business was sold to Ricoh. Buying a hardware company at this point will be a stupid move for the company and will surely rub its stockholders the wrong way.

Let’s see what IBM’s next moves will be.