I bought the Eee PC 901 as a loan system at work and I love it. Just back from a trip to London, 2 hours on the train down, one and off work at the client and then watched Love Guru (hmm) on the way back. The battery failed in the final credits. That’s about six hours of work! So I agree with somebody else, the Eee PC with it’s USB storage wins hands down for battery life. We don’t need GB of storage for a loan system - external USB pens are fine. We use Citrix at work and therefore, my electronic office ran just like it does at my desk. Unbelievable power.
I travelled with just the Eee PC, Orange mobile broadband USB mobile phone. I stood on the tube with this tiny package looking at others lugging their big laptop bags around.
What’s even better, Orange have partnered with Virgin Trains to place mobile boosters inside the train connected to mobile antenna externally. This meant an almost solid 3G connection all the way down. It’s not perfect and Citrix does pause from time to time (never anything lost though).
Without appearing sexist, I expected it to be most popular with our female members of staff. Okay so it’s not pink but they’ve not been queuing up to borrow it. Strange…
Rob.
PS. It’s a perfect player of video’s encoded to DivX on the aircraft style seats. The screens on bigger laptops are too big to get vertical so you see people straining to see/type on their screen.
Ohh yes, and it only cost 250 ex. VAT… we were paying getting on for 1,000 for a small Dell Latitude a while back which had a slightly bigger screen. Shows how much we were paying over the odds…
What gerald said - while browsers are the most used piece of software, that’s also because they’re the smallest field, in practical terms.
Lots of people want to run games and such (but of course, such a wide variety of them that they’ll never come close to Big Three Browsers on a most-used list), and a netbook isn’t going to be real good for that.
(For what it’s worth, I’m very happy with my Dell Mini9. Soon, a 32GB SSD and 2GB ram upgrade.
People should also be aware that the XP on at least the Dell is XP ULCPC edition, not normal XP. I’m not sure what the differences are, but I imagine it already has extraneous services off by default or not installed to save space.
I cheated the whole issue and put my spare bought-in-a-box-retail copy of OSX on it. I’ve bought enough Macs - and will again - that I feel absolutely no moral qualm about breaking the license and not-cheating Apple out of the money for the netbook they don’t sell and therefore I cannot purchase from them.)
Hmm, ‘If I were Apple or Microsoft…’ I thought MS had already announced that its replacement for Vista would be targeting the browser OS, and that’s why Google joined the fray with Chrome, to provide THE OS of the future, Google Docs and the like remove the need for local software, it will only get better. Its a return to the good old thin client days but still giving you the productivity.
With Google leading the way in datacentre efficiency as well it can only be a good thing. Consumers will need less power, data centers will be more efficient. The modern computer is the electronic equivalent of an SUV, most people don’t need quad cores to browse the web (but yeah, I do love mine when it comes to compiling).
I was right with you until you said it ran XP. Not that any of the top 3 OSes seem light enough to be appropriate for this task, but XP has to be the worst possible choice.
The system shouldn’t need maintenance, it should have an OS that cannot be modified, and it has no requirements for interoperability.
XP Suspends poorly, crashes when you suspend and change configuration regularly, resumes very slowly, starts up slowly (although none of the top 3 are quick, XP is the slowest), and has been fairly easy to corrupt via a multitude of security flaws.
OSx isn’t really an option because it’s not the right hardware, but you’d think there would be a severely trimmed down Unix-based OS with zero configuration (like the iPhone) that would be much more appropriate for a net device
About the eee 701: But, this week I found myself away from my desk, trying to code for five hours on the tiny keyboard and tiny screen.
Yeah, it seems like no one really wants a 7 netbook. Too small to be usable. 9 or 10 seems to the popular spot. I have the blue version of the Acer one and it’s about the perfect size. Any smaller and I don’t think I could type.
These are nice and all, but I do as little computing in the cloud as I have to. I’m sorry, but cloud computing is as much of a fad as Web 2.0 is, as the dot-com bubble was. Besides, when one lives outside of major metropolitan areas, you might as well get used to having the thing tethered to a wall, because wifi doesn’t exist out here.
Of course, I’ll admit to being something of a luddite. No cellphone, no ipod, no TV. I fail to see the enjoyment of being bombarded with media on a constant basis, and those who really need to speak with me knows where I live.
I’m in for the hi-res, solid state, instant on, but would also like my choice of browser (which won’t ever be IE, I’d bet, so that makes it a *nix base) and some sort of write-to filesystem and basic editor so it’s not a brick if I’m offline (and so I can save and transfer to my Big Box if I want to).
While we’re at it, let’s have Amazon talk to Pragmatic about their experience distributing books without DRM - I can’t see buying ebooks in a locked-in format like Kindle’s.
Been using little notebooks like that for the last 8 years.
Started out with the Sony U-1, and now on to a a href=http://www.pocketables.net/2008/07/review-kohjinsh.htmlKojinsha/a, which is similar to the Acer, but has a swinging screen with touch and a nice little strap on its back so it looks like a small suitcase. Oh and it plays digital TV too. Costs about the same as the Acer too.
I just bought one of the Dell minis for my 4 year old daughter. Fully functional laptop / netbook the perfect size for a 4 year olds hands cheap enough to spit at? Couldn’t pass it up.
@Tim: One thing that people seldom mention (and the press has not addressed) is the limitations that Microsoft has put on netbooks. Here’s a quick hint… How many netbooks come with high resolution screens (as in above 1024x600) AND an Atom processor of 1.6GHz? Seen any netbooks coming out using the new Atoms with hyperthreading?
Most people are not paranoid delusional, that’s why they don’t mention it.
@Tim - ‘Personally, the first netbook I see with a solid state drive, Atom processor 1.6Ghz, and resolution of 1280x768 (or preferably higher…) will get my money’
The Dell Mini 9 has a 1.7 Ghz Atom with a 16GB ssd and a resolution that is PERFECT for its 12 diag screen… anything higher would make the text illegible.
Is it a record? 4 links to other blog entries of yours, plus 3 links to your affiliate account at Amazon to buy that laptop? Out of 11 total links? I miss the days when you were a programmer first, and a blogger second. I don’t mind seeing ads in what I read, but for the past years, reading your blog, I assumed every link would take me to something meaningful, rather than a way to drive up your revenues.
And what about the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and the G1? I picked up an iPod touch for $300. If I didn’t have so much music, video and other content, I could have bought the $230 module and saved $70. Or, sign up with ATT and get an iPhone for $200. I have no idea about the G1, but I bet its pretty compatible.
No, the web browser of the future isn’t the mini-laptops, but the super-smart phones and hand held devices now coming out. I have no problems using my iPod Touch for web browsing or using Google apps while I sit enjoying my coffee at a local coffee shop. The pages render beautifully even if the space is a bit cramped.
I’ve already worked with a few websites helping them become iPhone friendly which included eliminating Flash-only navigation and IE incongruities that FireFox seems okay with, but WebKit doesn’t like. We also work on iPhone formatting. This is not the same as the old WAP pages of yore. The idea isn’t to make a special iPhone webpage ghetto, but to improve current webpages to make them easier to use with iPhone’s features. For example, formatting a column, so when a user zooms in on it on an iPhone, it fills in the entire screen width.
No, Microsoft’s big competitor isn’t Linux or Mac OS X. It’s WebKit and the various OpenSource web foundations. WebKit is the basis of both Google’s and Apple’s portable browsers and will become the standard browser rendering engine on almost all Linux based devices. I expect to see both Opera and FireFox switch over to the WebKit rendering engine.
Microsoft, unlike the Dinosaurs of yore, sees those little furry mammals evolving and realize they’re a threat. Unfortunately, Microsoft so far have been unable to figure out how to meet these challenges.
I bought a $600 Averatec laptop for just this sort of thing… works great for browsing the web, Word, or watching a movie when out of town. Well worth the investment. Plays a few games too…
Battery life though is a complaint… you can’t even watch one DVD without plugging the little guy in. So it’s much less usefully in a plane than it is in a hotel room.
I believe MS is well aware of this, and I figure this is the reason why they’ve thrown so much into Silverlight out of nowhere and moved a lot of the Live apps onto the web. I think they realize if they don’t get a chunk of the web app market they might become irrelevant.
I was following this company for a while. They used to sell a small, simple laptop. They have changed their angle to a Web OS. http://www.zonbu.com/home/
The idea was a small Linux laptop with solid state drive. It has many advantages, good battery life, fast boot.
Anyhow, all the user data is stored online. All applications are run from the internet.