When it comes to shrinking and making things light and petite, leave it to the Japanese. They have all the credentials; they even miniaturised Disneyland.
When you want a truly portable notebook, my recommendation is always to go Japanese.
American notebook makers are irritated that Sony - a name synonymous with electronics and the Discman, but not the computer - has grabbed some precious market share with its sleek, beautiful, silver-and-purple, wafer-thin Vaio series, at the same time creating a new class of notebooks dubbed the ultra-portable.
Since then, we have seen many valiant attempts from Twinhead, Gateway, Micron, Compaq and Hewlett-Packard, all trying to squeeze their notebooks in a tight corset while force-feeding more Ram, hard-disk space and the latest Intel Pentium chip.
Gateway's latest, the Solo 3150, is a deceptively heavy notebook despite its compact footprint. Packed in an attractive leather case about the size of an A4 sheet of paper but about three centimetres thick, it looks really light.
Then I picked it up. Gateway says it weighs 2.36 kilograms, my bathroom scales say 2.5kg and my under-exercised pectorals make it 2.7kg.