Hi all, I need to tell my dad what to get.
He has a EEE900 but finds it useless.
He wants a small laptop (less than 14") that is good enough to do light photoshopping (rgb scaling and resizing).
Also some sort of mobile broadband to be able to use it on the highway.
Would be great if it doesn't exceed $800

I was thinking core i5 and minimum 2gb ram (i'll put in larger sticks if necessary)

Lenovo X220 is a very powerful ultra portable, comes with Sandy Bridge Core i3/i5 (or i7 if you wish to drop $$$), 12.5'' 1366x768 (optional IPS screen, very nice for photo editing), very nice laptop for the money.

+1. good reviews on it. Get the baseline X220 (not the X220i). Note that it comes with one 4GB DDR3 SDRAM 1333MHz SODIMM. Buy another 4GB stick for $25 to get dual-channel performance and to beef up Photoshop speed.

Windows 7 with 2GB RAM would be useless - especially running image processing s/w.