I have an Eee 1005PE. I've never run out of battery before, so I don't know what the actual life is, but the indicator says 12 hours. That's with 3G/4G and the backlight reasonably bright. Without radio or bright backlighting, it's more like 16. (And it's not a 9-cell battery, either.)

(One problem with netbooks is that they cut corners to be cheap. I would like to see what a non-corner-cutting netbook could do. The Macbook Air is pretty close.)

Well, they would have better battery life if someone would build one.

The ultimate coding/writing machine for me would be a full-size Lenovo chassis/battery with a 7 inch screen and a 500mhz arm CPU.

Plus maybe some solar panels on the back of the screen so I could conceivably go a summer without plugging it in.

I'm seriously considering hacking one out of one of the cheapo Android tablets, but if Lenovo would just release the Skylight already I'd just buy one of those and probably plug a real keyboard into it.

Do you have one of the older models? I owned a 701 when they first came out, and I don't remember very good battery life, but the technology was new and I've heard recent models have much better life.