Can one beef up the RAM on these boxes? That and extending battery life seem to be all that is needed to make this usable.
One of the attractions of this particular model is that it runs Windows XP, … But I could easily see myself leaving some of that potential flexibility on the table if the price dropped to $199 or so.
Absolute horse puckey. The industry HAD exactly what you describe on the market half a decade ago in the form of the internet appliance: small, dirt cheap, low powered web/email/IM machines that ran non-Windows OSes. The i-Opener was the most well known one, though there was also the 3COM Audrey, the MSN Companion/MSN TV devices and so forth.
Nobody bought them. It simply wasn’t worth it when you could spend a few dollars more and be able to run other, more interesting applications as well.
Uh, Firefox doesn’t register on any of our WebTrends reports as being more heavily used than IE. I’ve gone back and forth between the two and find myself using IE more often. It doesn’t have the annoying constant updates and upgrade, for one.
For the small case of using a netbook for 5 hours at a time with the small keyboard - most of them have bluetooth built in, so you can use a bluetooth keyboard and/or mouse with them. This wouldn’t work on a plane, but it is useful when you are in the home or office.
Another data point - plugged the Asus 901-XP into a 1400x1050 monitor and pressed the LCD/CRT button and it changed to that resolution. It also had an extend mode to use both monitors at the same time.
For Canadians - Netbooks in stock now were priced when the Canadian dollar was a lot higher. With new stock, they will be going up 10-20% (or more if the Canadian dollar drops more). As an example, a Wii is $269 Canadian now, which is $208 in US dollars.
``it runs Windows XP, an operating system I, and every other software vendor on the planet, know by heart’’
Every other software vendor, except the ones that don’t (like the one I work for)… There are actually people who develop strictly for Linux.
@Doug
Why have a whole lot of computing power in your hands? It is thin clients all over again.
Because I wan’t to use MY data in a few years also.
For some tasks i have an 8088, an Pentium 1 and a PIII Laptop. And guess what? Sometimes I play an old game, or open old Documents with Software that doesn’t run under actual OS’s.
Think about storing data online:
I got an alando account nearly 10 years ago. Alando was bought by ebay 99 with the promise that the market will remain the same. 2001 it become ebay, lots of changes. Than a merge with user data happened. There I lost my account, because the same name was taken by someone at ebay.com. Thats just a login to a site the company gets money for if i use it.
Also I had a few mail accounts, some paid, some free - some gone forever (even lifetime accounts). Newsgroups, also tel. providers - gone over the years. (Compuserve europe has kicked its last users 2008)
Remember Northernlight as really big search engine?
The provider of my first website - dead.
So why put data just online? Do you think your provider will still be there after a big financial crash?
I like netbooks. But mostly not for the net. Everything that is importent is at least 2 times offline.
I like the idea of internet oses like Ulteo, use it wherever you like. But i also want my data offline, and accessable over offlien tools (and to see something like thunderbirds 5 folder imap accunt is very sad and a good excuse not to use thunderbird).
Remember google calender with shared searchable user calenders as default?
Remember hacked debian security patch servers?
So no way that i store important data online.
Yeah, I got an hp mini note a around 6-8 months ago and I was pretty happy. (the rez is a bit higher). I picked up an aspire one for my mom to take to some friends in Peru and it was loved down there. I set it up and was surprised how good the aspire one was for the money.
I really would love to have on of 2 things:
a netbook that is a tablet so that I could use it for PDFs and eBooks and such, (lie on a bed/couch and read it).
OR the back of a netbook be an e-ink screen… though thats more of a pipe dream / drive up the cost of the netbook.
@louis
You mean either the Gigabyte M912 Netbook with Touchscreen 1.280 x 768 or the Schenker Tablet PCs ( Real Tablet 649€ up a href=http://www.mysn.de/detail.asp?userid=il54925tf6658ed48clq6cf36m36gijsz3iiij6nw1c89djsKategorienOrder=010;020;020;100bestellnr=adkk0001http://www.mysn.de/detail.asp?userid=il54925tf6658ed48clq6cf36m36gijsz3iiij6nw1c89djsKategorienOrder=010;020;020;100bestellnr=adkk0001/a )
I’ll cast another vote for the Dell Mini 9 with WinXP. This thing is practically silent, quite light, and yet still very usable. They even managed to position the Ctrl key where it belongs on the keyboard - something IBM should take note of.
Since my primary PC at home died, I’ve gone to mostly cloud computing, keeping nearly all of my working docs and such on Google Docs, etc. so I can access them via the Mini 9, a full-size notebook, my work PC, or wherever. Only thing I haven’t found a good solution for is a way or place to keep my Favorites/Bookmarks… So, I’ve got IE Favorites and FF Bookmarks (and whatever Chrome calls it version of those) scattered across half a dozen machines… Yuck.
it’s mostly for web surfing, light email, maybe a tiny bit of miscellaneous office work. ?
Come on, I used to create websites in php with mysql, check email, surf the web and write articles on a Pentium 150MHz with 80MB RAM and a 2Gig hard drive. 
@Stephen: Welcome to the world of blogging as a business. If you don’t like the affiliate links, just ALT+F4.
how come there is so much of a border round the screen
big waste of screen real estate
seems to be the same story with the new HP one
what gives?
The specs are indeeed modest, but not bad at all for the $369 sticker price:
Intel Atom 1.6 Ghz CPU
802.11 b/g wireless
1 GB ram
120 GB hard drive
8.9 1024x600 display
Windows XP Home
webcam, mic, 3 usb ports, ethernet, vga out.
The specs made me cry. My current dev machine (old as anything, but still working,) has a 1.47 Ghz CPU, 480 MB of ram, and a 8 GB hard drive.
I really need to get a better computer.
On a more on-topic note - I think this is a viable future for computing - even more so than just for web-browsing.
One thing that I’m surprised hasn’t come up yet is that the return rate on Linux-based netbooks is terrible. People buy them, find something on them that doesn’t work at all like the Windows that they’re used to, and return them again. Now I’m not complaining since this got me a brand-new netbook at about 1/3 off retail, but this is poison for the manufacturers and/or retailers because the return rate is way above anything else they sell. That’s why we’re seeing so many of them sold with XP Home, not because of some Microsoft attempt to kill Linux at the low end (their special pricing can’t hurt, but they’re only doing it because they have no hope of filling the niche with Vista and they need some sort of stopgap for that market segment) but because the vendors have learned that netbook + Linux = high product return rate = net loss on sales.
While i think Netbook has a great future. Saying 1GB is enough is like saying 640k is enough for everyone. There are HUGE amount of features you can put in with more Ram.
Then it brings out a interesting question that i hope someone could someday answer.
If Netbook, Internet, is really the next stage of computing. And if Operating System doesn’t matter. What does that mean for X86? Does it matter as well?
We could just have the same Web Experience with ARM, Especially with Cortex A8 and A9.
I still find it easier to curl up in bed with an iTouch than a laptop.
Maybe if they made a netbook with a zoomable interface and a touchpad that supports pinching?
I think a Netbooks make a revolution in our world. Millions of people from poorest regions of our planet got the opportunity to learn, to work, to teach and to leave at absolutely new level.
Actually some individual games would probably be pretty competitive with any browser that isn’t IE too. The second most used browser is Firefox which boasts about 125 million users. There are many online games that have user bases over 100 million, including at least one that has over 250 million according to a recent issue of Game Developer Magazine.
Good article.
The web browser as an OS is truer than you thing. The open-source Google Chrome incorporates abstractions for the most important operating system features such as such as the V8 JS engine, process-bounded tabs, WebKit UI rendering, Google Gears for local storage, interprocess security permissions. etc. Once the OS is in the browser, it won’t matter if you are running IE8, Firefox 4.x or Google Chrome as far as the user is concerned. If it doesn’t matter, Linux provides more value than Microsoft OSs. At this point, why pay $249 for a Windows netbook instead of $99 for a Linux netbook?
It gets better. Your top 10 list of applications are web browsers, email, and office apps. Google gives away online apps (docs, spreadsheets, presentations, notes, pictures, videos, etc) for free with most of the functionality that most people use. And Facebook is a web app too…
Also, at anything under $200, the netbook becomes much more reachable to a lot more people. That in itself will make it hard for Microsoft to dominate the OS market share.
In fact, if service providers are smart, they’ll include a free netbook with a 2 year ISP service contract. They already do the same for cell phones that cost a lot more. i.e. Netbooks could easily turn into a service dongle for ISPs. This great for people unable or unwilling to front the cash for a computer, but are happy to pay an extra $5/month and/or sign a long-ish service contract get the netbook for free. For ISPs, a $99 netbook isn’t vastly different from the marketing costs to acquire a new long-term customer.
Time will tell…