The MacBook Air is pretty.

Pretty EXPENSIVE, amirite?

Anyway it got me thinking. In the world of laptops, is it better to be thin or better to be small?

I say small!

Sony’s kind of had the small laptop market to itself for the past few years. But with prices for a Vaio TZ starting at two grand, subnotebooks have been a pretty unpopular product category.

All that changed in October when Asus released the Eee PC, a weakly-equipped Windows and OSX-compatible ultraportable for just $399.

It’s got half-gig of ram, 4 gigs of solid-state storage, and a sad 800×480 resolution, but at 6.5×9″ it’s not much bigger than a paperback book. It’s definitely not a desktop replacement, but at just 2 pounds it’s the perfect size and weight to throw in a bag for a plane ride or whatever.

Everex’s Cloudbook goes on sale tomorrow for the same price as the Eee, but with a 30GB hard drive (and a strangely off-center LCD screen.)

I think 2008 will be the year of the small footprint notebook. Steve Jobs got it so wrong!

Once these hit 1024×768 I might consider picking one up. Maybe.