What is the most influential piece of personal technology of the past two years? Amazon's Kindle? Apple's iPhone? Research in Motion's BlackBerry? All of these North American devices are worthy but my prize goes to the Asus Eee PC made by Asustek of Taiwan.

“A lot of people scoffed at them and I must admit I was an early disbeliever,” says Bob O'Donnell of IDC, the research group, about Asustek, which in October 2007 came up with its small, light, cheap laptop computer known (misleadingly, it turns out) as a netbook.

Few analysts grasped the significance of the Eee because they did not think that people in the developed world would buy a not-very-powerful device with a tiny screen and a small keyboard. Meanwhile, US companies from Dellto Microsoft and Apple gazed studiously elsewhere.