If you’re anything like me, you might be tired of lugging around a full-sized laptop from airport to airport and meeting to meeting. Enter the ultraportables. While we are all aware of the cake-cutting Air, manufacturers like ASUS and now MSI are jumping into the ultraportable market with laptops that are usable and highly portable.

The MSI Wind — I wonder where they got the name? — is a 2.6-pound, 10-inch laptop what will sell for about $499 on June 16 from MSI. A Linux version will follow later this summer for $399. It runs a 1.6-GHz Atom processor and offers 5.5 hours of battery life.

Considering the average heavy duty laptop costs about $700-$1000, these mini-machines might make a good around-the-house or on the road laptop. Because they are fully-featured laptops with keyboards and hard drives, you don’t lose any of the functionality and because they weigh less than 3 pounds, you won’t get a hernia. One caveat: a number of these don’t have built-in optical drives, so you might need to get an external USB drive.

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Here is the the next-generation OLPC. It will consist of dual touchscreens on a single spine and include keyboard, face-to-face, and ebook functionality. The touchscreens will be built by a start-up by former OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen. These screens will be readable in direct sunlight, just like the OLPC.

I’m glad that the second generation OLPC is more of an ebook than a laptop. While the “laptop,” as a designed object, is an excellent tool, books are what define our early education and creating an electronic book that works and is actively useful seems far more intelligent than the original OLPC, which is a stab at a “less is more” mentality that eventually hobbles the very people it is designed to help.

I remember a very interesting statistic from Freakonomics: the single, traceable correlation between a child’s ability in school and his home life are the number of books a family has in their home. I’m paraphrasing, but I’ve taken it to heart and I believe it to be true. A laptop is an interactive tool. An ebook, even if it’s just a glorified, dual screen laptop, is a reading tool. That is why tablet PCs never took off in the mainstream: people don’t know what to do with a form factor that is clearly not a laptop yet is also clearly a powerful computer. There is no way to connect the act of “scratching out words on a tablet” to processing worksheets in a spreadsheet. Why doesn’t the iPhone have handwriting recognition? Because it’s a horrible way to talk to a computer, even now. But that’s a different rant entirely.

That said, I worry about the project as a whole.

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