Is 'Eee PC' being drained of all meaning?

I love my Asus Eee PC 701, even though it's starting to look a bit long in the tooth next to some of the funkier new models.

Why I love it is pretty important to the rest of this argument, so let's just recall why everyone got so keen on the netbook in the first place:

• It's cheap. It's so marvelously cheap, I can afford to lose it/have it nicked, which means it gets taken to places my laptop doesn't. Like on holiday.
• It's the right kind of cheap. £250 or so is a classic mass market price point for tech. It's where a purchase stops being something you need to talk yourself into, and becomes something you need to talk yourself out of. Just as the digital camera went ballistic at £250, so went the netbook.
• It's so small. I'd wanted something like a netbook for years, ever since I saw my first ultraportable Sony Vaio, but there was no way I was going to pay Vaio prices when I already had a laptop. With the Eee PC, I got the size without the pricetag.
• And it can do so much. Nuff said.

But if you own one, you already know this. However, I am starting to wonder if the manufacturers do.

First up, the new Sony Vaio. It's lovely. It solves the netbook keyboard problem at a stroke, but at a price: £850 big ones to be specific. Sony is anxious not to call it a netbook, but if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it's a duck, even if it's priced like quail.

Then there's Asus. The excellent Erik Sink mentioned last year that Asus was in danger of throwing away the Eee PC brand by attaching it to too many types of product.

Right on schedule, yesterday, it slapped the Eee PC name on a keyboard, a tablet and a laptop, adding to the monitors, external drives, and god knows what else.

It doesn't want to "treat (the brand) like a low-cost notebook concept," apparently.

Just in case anyone was mistakenly still thinking the Eee name had anything left to do with netbooks, Asus has just discontinued the original 7" Eee PC form factor - you know, the one that pioneered the fastest growing category in the industry at the moment. I would love to know what Erik makes of that.

Instead, it wants to focus on 10" 'netbooks' (or laptops as we used to call them).

So we have Sony which wants its netbook to be called a laptop, and Asus which wants its laptop to be called a netbook.

You only have to look at a Vaio to know what it is about. The original Eee PC is one of the few Asus products that gave me an equally strong, if different, sense of identity.

Strong identities like that are hard to come by. I hope Asus knows what it is doing.