I tapped on the keys of a Samsung NC210 netbook in bestbuy the other night. And I got to thinking… netbooks are a very temporary product.
What is a netbook?
1. Small
2. Cheap (the magic number is $300)
3. Good enough for basic needs (web, email, etc)
Do they deliver? Well…. sorta.
Small? Yes! Bravo. Small. But THICK, mostly. Why?!?
Cheap? Every netbook I’ve seen that seems remotely good costs $350 or more (you can get a proper laptop for 450 or 500 though…)
Good enough? NO! Certainly not the one I ran with Win7 starter on it. Several second delay to show me the right-click context menu is NOT FAST ENOUGH.
Anyway, they’re silly because in a year or two as prices come down, you can just jam a real modern processor in there for the same cost. Any low-spec laptop could probably cost around 300 in the near future.
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Some of them have outstanding battery life, like 10+ hours.
Also, while you can get thin/light laptops, they are crazy marked up still. A $500 laptop will be much heaver than a $400 netbook.
Ah yeah, battery life. They do deliver on that. It is also possible that they work much better under XP (the 7 perf I saw just seemed kinda bad).
I’m still not decided. I think they should be cheaper and faster to be worth it… but I’m not totally sure yet.
I think the big problem on price is the screen. NVidia is theoretically making an x86 CPU for the netbook market to pair with nForce; if that actually happens it will drive prices way down.
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