WE WISH we had a tiny PC. We wouldn't use it for anything, we'd just carry it around so we looked important.

Smallness. Is it a good thing or a bad thing? That's a tough call. Nobody wants to stagger into the bathroom to find a woodlouse the size of a toddler skittering around their bath. That suggests smallness is good. But imagine going out to dinner and ordering steak and chips, only to be delivered meat no larger than an AA battery and chips barely as big as a TicTac. You'd be angry. You'd ask to see the chef, and when the chef came to your table you'd kick him to death on the spot. To tell the truth, that's something we've never really been comfortable with about you. You should learn to chill out a bit.

So, smallness: good or bad? Turns out it all depends on the context. In the land of gadgetry, where devices shrink by the day, a new plague of super small mobile PCs has been doing the rounds. Dubbed netbooks, which is like notebooks only a smaller word, these petite portables offer a slice of the functionality of a proper computer but take up a mere fraction of the space. They're a brilliant halfway house between the laptop and the PDA and frankly they've been needed for a while, because lugging a laptop around is generally as convenient as temporary pregnancy - albeit with a detachable, rectangular baby - and typing on a PDA requires fingers like toothpicks and the patience of the Pope.

New off the mini-block is the Samsung NC10, which joins offerings from Acer, Toshiba, Maplin, Commodore, MSI, LG and the Asus EeePC that kickstarted this whole trend back in late 2007. Spec wise, the Samsung has an Intel Atom processor, 80-160GB of storage, a webcam, a memory card reader, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Windows XP and a claimed battery life of eight hours. That's just a load of gubbins though. What actually counts is the "Protect-o-Edge" technology - which supposedly makes it tougher but which, since it's called "Protect-o-Edge", actually just makes it more camp - and the genuinely insane anti-bacterial keyboard that supposedly destroys all known nasties using nano-sized silver ion powder. Which then goes on your fingers and into your eyes and lungs. Well, probably not, they'll have tested for that kind of thing. Still, it's mental.

Small PCs, it emerges, can be good PCs, at least if you're planning to carry them about and do simplistic chimp tasks on them like typing words, playing Minesweeper and looking at a quarter of a picture of some people having sex. Under no circumstances buy one if you don't already own a real computer. Otherwise, when the giant woodlice invade, they'll eat you first. Because you'll deserve it.