Well, the Dell Inspiron 700M has a 12.1" widescreen and weighs 4.1 lbs with the built-in optical drive (no need for a docking station or Firewire optical drive). But it's also thicker than the 12" PowerBook at 1.5", so it really won't be a whole lot more mobile. That's the lightest of their mainstream line, but if you choose the small business store you can look at Latitude notebooks, the smallest of which is 3 lbs and 0.8" thick.
Of course there are options from other companies. IBM is still selling ThinkPads, and they are very nice. They tend to be expensive, though, and I don't know how much longer they'll be around since IBM has sold their computer making division. The ThinkPad X31 is under 4 lbs, also has a 12" screen, and costs something like $1700. Pretty steep.
After looking around it seems that the smallest most ultraportable notebooks get is a 12" screen. Below that and you get into some specialty notebooks, often made by Sony, which maybe have 10.4" screens. Hell, I found a "Linspire" (read: Lindows) notebook for under $1000 with a 12" screen that weighs 3 lbs. It doesn't come with an optical drive and the processor is a 1 GHz VIA Antaur (VIA is best known for motherboard chipsets, not CPUs), but it's cheap and it might just get the job done.
|