Acer Aspire One and Asus Eee 1000HD Review - Verdict: Great

I don't know why Jason didn't write about the Acer (I bought it from him), but that's life. Here's my take on these two laptops.

I bought the Aspire One just to check out this whole netbook craze, and I fell in love with it. I brought it to my brother's house, and his fiancee liked it so much we went to the store and got her the Eee, and it's just perfect for her. Either one is perfect because it's just enough computer for ALL of her everyday tasks. And either one is perfect for ALL of the everyday computing tasks performed by 90-95% of all computer users. Really. They're both just the right size, have 1GB of RAM, 120GB hard drives, Windows XP Home, and a CPU that can handle MS Office applications and anything that runs in a browser.

The HUGE selling point is that these netbooks can do everything you need AND they're small and light enough to take anywhere. They make it easy to use a computer. If you have a wireless network in your house, you'll find that you just take it wherever you're going.

Each machine has some advantages over the other:

Aspire one: Built-in webcam, mouse buttons on side of touchpad, dual-core Atom processor

Eee: Very high resolution screen (though to see anything higher than 1024x700 or so you have to pan around), mouse buttons on bottom (normal place) of touchpad, Celeron M processor

Those are the main differences between them as far as I'm concerned. And the processor difference doesn't seem to matter - they both feel snappy.

I still need to keep my Thinkpad T61p for its 8GB of RAM and dual hard drives, but I plan to bring my Aspire One with me on trips because it's just so easy and convenient to use.

If you're considering a laptop, I would STRONGLY urge you to look at the netbooks out there. There's a good chance that you can find one that will do everything you need for a lower price (and with a much smaller size) than a traditional laptop.

Verizon HTC Touch Pro Review - My verdict: Skip it

I just got a Verizon HTC Touch Pro yesterday, and I'm already returning it after attempting to use it for several hours. I was VERY excited about getting this phone, but it's just horrible. Beyond bad. Horrible. Don't get one, and here are some reasons why:

Verizon's version has less memory than other versions of the phone.

I don't know if it's the memory, but this phone is SLOWWWWWWWWW. I've seen video reviews of other versions of it, and it looks absolutely snappy. Verizon's version (maybe because of the memory, but I don't know) is absolutely NOT snappy. That could be the reason they disable TouchFLO3D by default, but even that doesn't help. Doing normal things with the device (close a window, open an application like Calc, etc.) normally takes several seconds (!). The whole experience is terrible.

"Sluggish" is too kind a word for this device - it's completely unusable.

So I'm back on my trusty BBerry Curve. I'll probably give the Storm a try once a newer firmware is available (many of the initial reviews complain about frequent crashes, and that's not something I want to deal with).