These days, laptops come in three flavors: ultra-thin, average all around, and ultra-powerful. Hitting either extreme, whether you're looking for maximum portability or performance, will typically hit your wallet pretty hard as well. Electronics purveyor Asus is looking to shake up that perception with its "Eee" line. The three E's evidently stand for easy to learn, easy to work, and easy to play. It looks like Asus might add easy on the wallet, too.

According to a forum post on EeeUser.com, Asus wants to have two of its inexpensive laptops out toward the end of this year. For somewhere between $250-$400, you'll be able to tote around a laptop with a dinky 7-inch display, 512 MB of RAM, a small internal flash drive and Wi-Fi. It looks like buyers will have the ability to upgrade certain components for a bit more money, like springing for a larger hard drive or a more powerful battery. The EeePC's specs might make it sound a bit weak, but they should be easy to lug around — Asus plans for the Eee notebooks to be around an inch thick or less, and weigh about two pounds.

Unfortunately for us in the U.S.A., it looks like the drool-worthy price of $200 will only be slapped on an Eee laptop variant sold overseas. A super-cheap, super-portable laptop would be a dream come true for those of us who don't want to lug around our lap-crushing work notebooks every time we take a trip. — Kevin Hall

Asus EeePC, via Crave