My wife is trying to talk me into getting a Netbook, and she said she almost bought me one before I’ve even seen one up close.:eek:
From what I’ve seen in the Amazon write-up, it’s a small laptop with a 10 inch screen and small keyboard. It’s set up to work on wi-fi. That means I could use it at Starbucks or Panera (I never go there) or any of a handful of public parks in my city (if I can see the screen in the sunlight.)
She says I’ll be able to keep in touch with internet stuff when we travel, once a year.
It costs $398.99.
Obviously, I’m not enthused. Would you buy one for yourself?
Best Buy has a few different models on display. I recommend that you try them out. What I didn’t like was that the keyboards seemed like they’d be hard to type on (small spaces between keys).
I keep trying to talk myself into one.
I think it would be cool to put OS X on it…
I can’t figure out what I would do with it, though - I already have a relatively small laptop (13" MacBook). Buying a machine that I can’t play DVDs on when I travel seems like a bad idea.
My advice: if you don’t think you’ll need it, don’t buy it. The nice thing about consumer electronics (computers especially) is that next month or next year the same product will be cheaper or you’ll be able to get more for the same amount.
I did hear that one of these companies was going to sell a tablet-style netbook and I might be interested in getting that.
Notebooks are essentially very low powered laptops. You pay a premium for the smaller form factor and that’s really all that they’ve got going for them. Forget about gaming, forget about most serious work.
It’s for internet browsing, light word processing, you tube video enjoyment, e-book reading.
Of course you can do the same thing and MORE on a regular laptop and probably for around the same price or even less. So again, it comes down to size. If you absolutely need it to be that small and light (maybe because you travel a lot, walk around a lot with it) then it might be worth it. Otherwise, go for a laptop.
I’ve seen small notebooks with 9-inch screens for less (like $299) through online distributors. I definitely think it’d be a great convenience – easy to slip into the briefcase and easy to travel with.
Pssst… it’s rumored that Apple will be selling a netbook with a “multi-touch” screen - like a larger version of the iPhone - later this year. Seems that Apple has ordered a pile of 10" screens from the same company (Wintek) that makes the iPhone screens.
I think you’re conflating netbooks and subnotebooks/ultraportables. Netbooks are very inexpensive, starting from $300. They have 10" or smaller screens, and almost always have Intel Atom processors and 512 MB-1 GB of RAM.
Ultraportables, like the MacBook air, Dell Inspiron D430, or Lenovo X-series ThinkPads, start around $1,200 and have more in common with other laptops and desktops, like higher RAM capacity, processors like the Core 2 Duo, and 12" or larger screens, but usually forgo built-in optical drives and have fewer ports.
Personally I think a netbook is a great traveling companion. You wouldn’t want to use it in a mobile office situation, though, because the small keyboard and touchpad would not be a good fit for extended office work.
Sorry, Kinthalis, but you couldn’t be more wrong about the price argument.
Netbooks, including the most popular ones, Asus Eee PCs and Acer Aspire Ones, sell between $250 and $400 or so (plus a few outliers), with many options below $350. Standard notebooks start at a retail price of about $400 (I checked the Best Buy ad for the week, and the main notebook page on Dell’s website), and are going to be about twice that for a decent one.
Granted, what you do with a netbook is not what you do with a notebook, but they’re not marketed as conventional notebook replacements. Netbooks are great for exactly the purposes you stated, and are ultra-portable; it takes a bit of a perspective shift to realize that, for some people, that’s all they need and want. Games mean nothing, playing DVDs is not important, but being able to browse the internet at a cafe or take along something very small and light for taking notes in college are perfect netbook tasks, for far less money than a notebook.
I wish I’d bought a smaller laptop, because 17" has proven to be a. quite a bit heavier than I expected b. actually bigger than my lap. But I wish I’d gotten something in the 14-15" range, not as small as the thing the OP is talking about. Those look like toys, and they can have very low specs (especially the Asus Eee) for prices almost as high as an adaquate “real” laptop.
My wife and I got a netbook for travel. We love it. Can’t play games on it, but it is perfect for pulling out at a hotel, airport, etc to check email, or the web. We are thinking about getting a second one so we don’t have to share.
Also my company is using netbooks to replace their office systems at HQ. The setup I saw on my trip to HQ had the netbook on a shelf above the monitor with the power, monitor, network cables connected. Then a small USB hub is connected to the netbook, and the keyboard, mouse, etc are connected to the hub. The heavy travelers are issued a second power supply so they don’t even have to pull the one out from under the desk.
I just picked up an Asus Eee (one of the 8.9" models); I haven’t had much time to play with it yet, but so far it looks like it will be perfectly adequate for my needs. I wanted something more portable than my laptop, with longer battery life. It came with Microsoft Works, which I’m not very familiar with, but from the quick perusal of its features should be sufficient. It came with a 160G hard drive and 1g Ram, which is more that my laptop had; it doesn’t have an optical drive, but I can live with that. I’m not into gaming, so that’s not an issue. The smaller screen may take some getting used to, but my only quibble with the keyboard is the odd placement of the right-side shift key - I keep hitting Enter instead of Shift.
And it was only a shade over $300, which was a real selling point for me.
There are two kind of netbooks. The first kind, for about $300 (in Canada) has 1 Gb of memory and an 8Gb flash drive, a couple of USB ports and something they call a “5 in 1” slot that I guess takes things like SD cards. The second kind is similar except it has a 160 Gb hard drive and costs about $400 and is a few oz heavier (2.5 lb instead of 2.2). I have tried the keyboards on both ASUS and Acer and prefer the latter. Before my next trip I will buy one, but I would be a lot happier with a 16Gb or 32Gb flash drive. I assume if I wait a few months I will see that.
Big advantage: they cannot run Vista and so MS is providing copies of XP (generally unavailable now). I will probably never replace my regular computers, so long as they run since I don’t think I can bring myself to live with Vista
If I didn’t already have a laptop, I’d get one. Most of my home computing can be done on a desktop, and now that I have a PS3, I want to be able to start streaming more media from my home network. That’s hard to do with a laptop, because I don’t have it running all the time because it’s usually away from it’s power source when operating. And that’s because I’m usually on the couch with it doing mundane internet browsing and light word processing - exactly what a netbook is for. When I game on my laptop I’m - at my desk, exactly where I’d put a desktop.
I really like my eeepc, and get a lot of use out of it, but it might not be a good thing for everyone.
I use it 95%+ of the time on the go - on the bus, meeting people at a cafe, in the boardroom at work. Wouldn’t really like it as a replacement for a home computer, but then, I already have a tower and a wide-screen laptop at home.
Got it right before the fancier models became available, it’s just got a 7" screen, 4 gig storage, 512 megs ram, and unix OS.
