As mentioned I bought an EEE 901. The battery life was the clincher. I've had it for about 3 weeks now, but have only really been using it for a week - since I finished doing my mobile broadband survey and got an Orange contract.

I can't really comment on the supplied Xandros install. I used it for a week or so, with Firefox + a shell for ssh (Ctrl-Alt-T IYF) but once I found time I installed Debian. I used the EEE installer which I think mainly does the appropriate ethernet driver magic without faff. Certainly went smoothly and all up and running minus wifi, which was soon sorted out with the rt2860-source package. Ethernet, bluetooth and camera all seem fine. SD reader is a USB device that appears when a card is inserted.

Battery life rocks. I can use it on the morning on the train (1hr30 or so), suspend to ram all day, use it on the train on the way home and then around the house in the evening without needing to charge it up. And that's while powering the USB 3G dongle and without any real tuning in terms of trying to save power by dimming the screen etc.

The keyboard *is* small. I wouldn't want this to be my main machine. However it is just about touch typable and the overall machine size is superb - even if I get a bad seat on the train I can still unfold the screen fully and it's my arms/elbows that end up being the issue rather than the laptop itself. I also notice the decrease in screen resolution down to 1024x600 (my old laptop is 1024x768); I can't fit enough xterms. :)

Speed seems fine too. I've not really pushed it hard (I've been resisting installing build-essential) but for a handful of xterms and Iceweasel it's doing a fine job. Equally firing up mplayer resulted in perfectly smooth playback of some mpeg4 over the network. Must actually remember to put something on it to watch on train journeys...

Speaking of train journeys the Orange dongle has integrated without too much hassle. 2.6.27-rc kernels have the appropriate hso driver but I found it caused crashes in areas of low/no signal. Patching up to the latest 1.6 driver solved the problem and adding PPTP to my work VPN into the mix means I can use offlineimap to pull mail locally and then read it with mutt on my journey even when the signal is fluctuating. Hopefully ridiculous starts can be mostly a thing of the past if I can get work done on the train.

What else to say? I'm quite liking the trackpad. The buttons are a bit stiff, but I'm getting used to the double tap, or tap and drag gestures in a way I never seemed to on the R200. Wifi reception seems fine. All in all I'm happy with my choice; the small keyboard is the main drawback and that's the (acceptable) price I pay for a small laptop.