Whether you know it or not, netbooks are having a profound effect on your computing life. Until the invention of the netbook ultra-mobility came with an ultra-hefty price tag. Stylish Sony S-Series laptops and the Macbook Air price out at $1500 and upwards. Tiny but boxy UMPC units were often over $1000. Then ASUS introduced the Eee PC...For less than $500 consumers could purchase their own small piece of the cloud computing world. The first netbooks were really intended as Internet portals and often came with "only" 512MB of memory, a tiny hard drive or even smaller solid state drive, and Linux to keep overhead down. But quickly the trickle of machines turned into an avalance. As a result features multiplied while prices dropped. Strong sales propelled Acer, maker of the popular Aspire One netbook, to the #2 spot in world-wide PC shipments.
The economics of netbooks are driving not just the prices of the netbooks themselves, but helping to force down the price of all other laptops. Suddenly companies like Compaq are coming out with $400 laptops that don't sacrifice on features. The cream of the crop feature-rich notebooks like Apple's Macbook Air and Sony's Z-Series are still priced with large premiums but Sony for example has introduced the P, the W, and the X series which are all sub-3 lbs. and are more aggressively priced.
This week I purchased an ASUS Eee 1005HA to take with me to Africa, not because I wasn't taking my laptop (I am), but to have as a backup for image transfer and viewing if something goes wrong with my laptop. It was actually cheaper ($350) than any of the dedicated photo viewers I could find, and not much more than the cost of getting a Hyperdrive type unit with a hard-drive and card reader for backing up photos. And for the price I got an entire computer capable of running Windows 7, DigitalPro for Windows and Photoshop (I've installed Elements 8 for $70 after rebate)--all with an 8 hour battery life. It is speedy? No. But it works and if I need a backup it'll be there. It comes with a 160GB disk drive--not enough for all my images on a long safari, but I can use the same externals I already bring for use with my laptop--and I upgraded it to 2GB of memory for another $40. For $20 I got a spare generic UDMA USB Card Reader (to back up my Lexar one) and I've got a device that will allow me not just to view photos but to actually teach from it if needed.
In fact the ability to teach from the machine was one of the nicest surprises. Obviously complex moves in Photoshop on large images will be slow, but basic workflow is easy to demonstrate along with simple Photoshop techniques. More excitingly the mobile graphics chipset happily drove my external monitor and HD projector at full resolution. Not only does that make it perfect for a lightweight device to travel with slideshows, but means that if you are in an office or even a hotel with a computer display you can ditch the tiny 10" screen and use a nice large one with no loss of functionality.
As to which laptop, frankly most of them have nearly identical specs right now. They have a 160GB disk, an Intel Atom processor (ranging from 1.3 to 1.66GHz), 1GB of RAM standard, a 9" or 10" screen and come with either Windows XP or Linux. Batteries are either 3-cell (good for about 4 hours) or 6-cell (good for about 8 hours). Most units have replaceable (although expensive) batteries, but some are fixed. The units weigh about 2.2 to 2.8 pounds with battery. Almost all of the units have WiFi and some have versions have Bluetooth. Most include a Webcam and a few also include 3G radios so you can use them for mobile broadband (with a data plan of course).
ASUS, Acer and Toshiba all make excellent products, with slightly different feels to the keyboard and other small differences in color options and style. HP also has been introducing some popular models. If you want to go "outside the envelope" there are now 11" screen models which give you a little more real estate at the cost of a little more size, weight and in some cases a slower processor. And ASUS has a really cool touch netbook--the T91--with a multi-touch scrren but also at the cost of a little weight and a slower processor.
Of course at this small size netbooks don't come with DVD drives. So for your software installation you'll need to plug-in an external DVD drive. And for airplane movie viewing you'll want to either Rip your DVDs using a product like AnyDVD or use a digital movie rental service like Amazon Unbox.
If you are a Windows user I'd recommend running Windows 7 on whichever one you buy if you can. Right now that option is limited to homebrew upgrades, but I expect that when Windows 7 is officially available there will be a volley of announcements that netbooks will be shipping direct from the factory with the new OS.
Whichever model you choose or whether you purchase a netbook at all the design innovations involved in their creation and the price reductions driven by the high volume of their sales will help you find a better, less expensive laptop the next time you go to get your next machine. Netbooks are even making an impact on the desktop computing space through Nettops--essentially netbooks built into a larger monitor.
Perhaps more importantly netbooks may do what the One Laptop Per Child initiative hasn't quite managed--which is to provide a low cost but fully powered computing environment for the developing world. Smartphones are great as far as they go, but are very limited in terms of a real, sit down in front of a screen computing experience for learning or working. Netbooks bridge the gap between the smartphone and the notebook computer. Look for an increasing number of hybrid products which combine some of the best features of each, and even of the Kindle.
It is likely to be a very exciting next couple years in the mobile computing space!--David Cardinal