Netbooks round 2 - a market overview
Ralf Haller
May 10th, 2009
About a year ago I bought two inexpensive Asus Eee netbooks, one for me and one for my colleague Francis, to check them out and see if they are of any use for work on the road. While mine ended up with my kids because I did not think it was useful for business traveling really, Francis has installed Ubuntu on it and seems to use it.
Looking at the recent vendor announcements, it seems though as if the netbooks are up for a new round of innovations and become more of a real, inexpensive business travel companion too. Here some of the latest developments in case you are also in the market for a netbook:
- ASUS Eee PC 1008H Seashell will come on the market now shortly and is a slim MacBook Air look alike but of course for the price of a netbook
- Dell MIni 10 is coming soon, they for once have even colors in their program and a 6-cell battery pack option too for ultra long battery runtime, it has Windows XP and not Vista installed which makes a lot of sense
- Sony Vaio P, a real beauty, but as mentioned in an earlier post you better wait for the XP Windows version to come out, Sony has not thought this one through properly shipping it with Vista who slows down the netbook making it not much fun at all
- Recent rumors have it that the Google Android could become the chosen OS for many netbooks, latest one is saying that T-Mobile and HTC will announce one shortly
- HP jumped on this bandwagon too and seems to have done a good job with the soon to come HP 2140, Laptop Magazine’s top pick for road warriors; this was back in January already though
- Acer’s Aspire One gets good reviews as well and is in the same league as the Asus Eee, a new model the Acer Aspire One D250 is coming out shortly now
- Lenovo’s IdeaPad S10 is more of real business netbook as people report unlike the Aspire One and Asus Eee who are considered as “toys”, but as mentioned above new models are on its way from these two vendors
- Samsung NC10 and MSI Wind are two other earlier netbook models that have many fans who like the spacious keyboard and solid builds, a new model the MSI Wind U123 got just announced and Laptop Magazine review mentions: “At $379, the MSI Wind U123 is easily one of the best netbook bargains around.”
Tags: Acer Aspire One D250, ASUS Eee PC 1008H, Dell MIni 10, HP 2140, Lenovo S10, MSI Wind U123, netbook, Samsung NC10, Sony VAIO P