Ping!
I imagine there’d be headaches looking at such a screen.
A netbook is a good second computer for taking on the road, but the small screen and keyboard would be a pain (literally) if it was your main machine.
The things have their limit. They are great entry laptops, for kids, and good for mobility when you don’t have the space or the strength to handle larger notebooks but overall that is where their usefulness stops.
In the end they will fill a niche and not much more.
Plus and minus’s
Plus: 9 hrs battery life, WinXP, runs any application you would normally run on a laptop. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB and ethernet ports.
Minus: No DVD/Cd drive, only 10.1 inch screen; Atom processor is not suffient for game play. Need external DVD player to watch DVD movies.
Perfectly adequate for doing homework, business work on a small unit that travels very well. Or, use your home PC to do the work, load it on the Netbook and take that on the road.
Love’em.
I think the standard smart phone renders the netbook pretty pointless. And if laptops are your thing it seems much better to shell out a little more and get a machine with a bigger screen and some decent power.
I think the slow is because it filled an empy niche. Once the niche was filled, like a flooded ditch, the sales rate slowed to match replacement/upgrade levels.
My wife just got one. 7 hours of battery life, a screen big enough to surf, a keyboard big enough to type 90%normal speed and small enough to fit in a cargo pocket. What is not to like?
Lots of other upside - Linux screams, basic apps are free, and Win7/64 makes Vista look glacial. Next upgrade is going to be a solid-state HD. They're coming down.
Bottom line - it's a low-powered machine that sacrifices processor speed for portability and long battery life. Seems like a good compromise to me - YMMV.
I have a netbook and a regular 15” laptop. I use the netbook for travel. It provides all I need without sore arms.
My wife got one for work because she liked that it would fit into a purse. Now I never see her using it. :)
I got a 17” laptop for work. I use it every day.
We’ve been testing a demo netbook from AT&T for a few weeks. Not a laptop substitute, but good for occasional remote service calls for after-hours support personnel. Makes a fine Citrix terminal for remote support too.
Some of my colleagues find they've gotten used to the smaller keyboards on the 9" notebooks but I found it difficult so I opted for a slightly bigger platform. Again, YMMV.
I love them, most come with graphics cards that support an extra monitor. For those that don’t know dual monitor mode is very effective. You can work on both screens separately and move the mouse from screen to screen. Net books are the way to go for most uses.
People have figured out that the Atom chip is very limited and is in fact a bottleneck for many applications beyond the basics. Personally, I’m waiting for the new Pine Trail chip from Intel.
Is is a good machine to send your college student off with so they were bought before school started and now simply slowed.
They are nice machines for the price.
Netbooks are wonderful to use to take it on the road for email or websurfing. Even nice around the house to lounge on the couch with while watching TV. Most laptops feel more like desktops. Certainly for gaming or some application where a bigger screen size is desirable, use something else. But for most people, 90% of their activity is websurfing.
The net book stuff was nothing more than a sells gimmick, many of those that bought them did so to keep up with the Jones. Lots of the hardly used turn up on ebay.
I’m thinking about getting a netbook. I’ve downloaded a lot of public domain pdfs to my desk top, then transferred them to my lap top for “lying on the sofa” reading. The big keyboard makes the laptop a bit of a pain, but the page up/page down loading is so much faster than what I’ve seen on e readers, plus the largest e reader screen I’ve seen is still an inch smaller than the net book screen(kindle DX, and it’s more expensive than a netbook too). I’d need a kindle or nook for downloading purchased books, but my preferred reading at the moment is 18th and 19th century mythology and folklore-there are hundreds of free pdfs available online from various sites. Kindle and Nook *can* handle pdfs, but it takes downloading a program for kindle, looks like Nook is set up already via B&N’s free titles. Anyhoo, getting a netbook just for pdfs seemed a good alternative to an e reader, and less of a PITA than a full sized laptop. Has anyone else used a netbook this way, and how’s it working out?
The first Netbooks were built on the theory that everything you needed was in the internet “cloud” so all you needed was taday’s version of a portable dumb terminal. So they had solid state storage and often used same flavor of Linux as OS.
Then people wanted a mini notebook so we saw XP, hard drives etc appear.
I bought a refurb Acer Aspire-1 for under $200 and it’s great on the road, full XP and 120GB hard drive; with a nine cell battery it’ll go seven hours or so, and it’s small and light weight, only 9” screen but it’s very sharp and bright.