My First Netbook Experience

[Rob Williams]

Alright, so I'm a little behind on the times. Netbooks have been around for a while, but it wasn't until recently that I've been able to spend a little more than a few minutes with one. With CES right around the corner, I decided to finally get one in and spend a week using it exclusively at the event. Read on for my initial thoughts so far.

You can read my personal thoughts on netbooks right here and rant about them here. I'll follow-up after CES with more refined thoughts, and given I plan to spend so much time with this thing, I'm sure I'll have them

 

[Kougar]

Well, all I can say is it is a netbook.. you don't want to be running more than three programs at once on one of those things! I will say I'm impressed ya got K-Ubuntu up and running on it so easily!

I never got into the small screen craze, 12" is probably as small as I would like. Whether you consider it a netbook or a notebook, MSI's latest X-Slim 320 is what I would go for in a laptop.... especially as it is what the Macbook Air should've been.

 

[Rob Williams]

I'm with you there on the 12" thing. I brought one of those with me to Computex last year and fell in love with it. It's neither too small nor too big. It's just a little more difficult to find a 12" that offers more than 3 hours of battery-life and doesn't cost more than $2,000.

 

[slugbug]

I don't understand why they don't use the dual core Atom processors in those net books.

 

[Kougar]

I'm with you there on the 12" thing. I brought one of those with me to Computex last year and fell in love with it. It's neither too small nor too big. It's just a little more difficult to find a 12" that offers more than 3 hours of battery-life and doesn't cost more than $2,000.

That was one reason I liked the Macbook Air. But there are plenty of laptops that offer 12" or bigger displays with 5 or more hours battery life that cost under $2K.

MSI's X-Slim 320, Dell Inspiron Mini 12", Dell Latitude E6400... Gateway had one as well, but as they have much worse build quality than a Dell I don't pay their stuff any attention. The Gateway laptops they partnered with my University to sell are the most shoddy built laptops I have ever seen.