We have gone through multiple ages of bigger is better, faster is good. Laptops constantly got bigger and bigger screens and the weight increased also, plus the power supplies increased in weight to power the machine. What was once a portable device now has the power of a desktop and approaches the weight of one. Now I am still a big fan of the tablet PC and have used one since they first appeared on the market, this summer I began to experiment with Netbooks.
A Netbook is a light weight small PC. There are many brands out on the market. I have experimented with three different ones. They in general are built around the Intel Atom chip. The chip comes in three speeds, N270 - 1.60 GHz, N280 – 1.66 GHz and N540 1.86 GHz. Most Netbooks come with one 1 GB of RAM (you can find 2 GB versions) and a harddrive in the 160 GB range. They do not have a DVD/CD drive built in, but have in general lots of USB ports. Most run on the XP Home Basic operating system, but a few run on Vista home. Google is planning on having an OS out before the end of the year for the Netbooks. Most have a 10.1 inch screen; I have an Acer with an 11.1 inch screen. Most weigh in at around 2.5 to 3 pounds and have a reasonable battery life approaching 3 hrs. They have built in Wi-Fi.
So in the day of 3GB Quad core processors (or faster) and 8 GB of RAM with a 22 inch screen desktop or laptop with a 17 inch screen what is the purpose of the Netbook.
First it is light weight, something my shoulder appreciates. I have loaded a full version of Office and it functions just fine, so therefore emailing is no problem nor is document creation. Over the past weekend I spent a lot of time surfing the net and it did a wonderful job, still have to get use to the touch pads.
My only concern is the size and closeness of the keys on the keyboard, which vary between the three models which I have experimented on. I have not tried to load any of my larger production applications.
I think for what most people use a computer for, email, document creation and web searches these are great little portable machines. I would not want to look at the small screen all day, but for a trip or a meeting I think they do an outstanding job. The price in general is between $299 and $399.
