In the world of electronic gadgets and gizmos, small is always in. Doubters to this credo only need watch any James Bond movie for conclusive proof. Nowhere has this trend been more true in recent years than the world of laptop computers, once the domain of a bigger is better mentality driven more by the fact that Intel, AMD, NVIDIA and ATI all paid the market scant attention compared to their desktop offerings. As a result, it was not uncommon to find laptop hardware woefully underpowered, and power users had no recourse but to find the biggest behemoth of a portable to lug around in order to get much done.

Then an unexpected trend started to happen. As large laptops such as Alienware’s legendary 17” models began to pack powerful hardware that while not on par with a desktop, could at least run most applications at a decent clip, consumers started to flock to the devices but bemoan the size and price. Soon Intel began to pay close attention, and AMD quickly followed suit in designing processors and platforms that were more energy efficient across all market segments. The result was that power and thermal characteristics became a sweeping trend that reformed all segments, and today it is very common to see processors rated by performance per watt.

This thinking led to massive leaps and bounds in terms of mobile technology. This unexpected trend picked up momentum and soon graphics suppliers followed the lead of CPU/chipset designers in focusing on the laptop market. A great example of this is the entire NVIDIA Geforce 7xxx family, which was designed from the ground up around technology designed for notebooks rather than taking desktop technology and trying to find a way to make it work in a laptop. As designers spent more time focusing their efforts on the mobile space consumers voted with their wallets and smaller was certainly in. In fact, thin and small laptops became so popular that they became sheik.

James Bond himself wound up using a Sony VIAO TT notebook, barely weighing a kilogram but capable of performing intensive computing tasks such as video editing with aplomb. The price tag? Upwards of $4,000 if configured properly. Sony is not, and never was alone in this market as competition from arch-rival Apple soon came in the form of the MacBook Air, the world’s thinnest laptop at the time of this writing. In all fairness it is worth noting that the MacBook Air, despite its amazing visual appeal does lack the optical drive found in Sony’s VIAO TT.

The battle lines have been clearly drawn: Small laptops are certainly in, but they can cost an arm and a leg. Even small netbooks such as the ASUS S101 are expensive compared to their ‘regular’ or ‘portly’ counterparts.