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.”

The new Sony VAIO P netbook is an eye catcher. This is due to its bright colors and its unique form factor. When you take a closer look it impresses with its lightweight and the bright display. It definitely looks and feels different to what you are used to and that alone is an innovative design no doubt. Looking at the technical specs on the positive side are: good keyboard, integrated mobile broadband, integrated GPS and a few neat zoom in/out and screen alignment buttons that make work more comfortable. On the negative side is clearly that they decided to  use Windows Vista as OS which is clearly the wrong choice for such a device, also they should have chosen the faster 802.11 n WLAN standard. (latest: it has n WLAN actually as I found out so the below table is not fully accurate)

BTW, the P stands for pocket and I think they tried to establish a new product category with it but while the design is great it does not fit into a pocket and to try to convince people with pictures like the one below that it does is plain ridiculous and they had to pay for this already with funny comments from the likes of e.g. Engagdet. This is what happens when some marketing communication folks get smart but lack deep understanding of the technology or market positioning. We see this often with Sony or Samsung where marketing does not match their design and engineering talent.  Laptop Magazine had an early look at it and liked it too. I am playing with the idea to get one as I am receptive for good design, ultra-portability despite the fact that the price tag is higher than with other netbooks. Overall I think they have done a very good job. If they now also offer other OSs such as Windows XP or Linux then it will be true winner IMHO.

Note: as expected without even testing it, Windows Vista makes this netbook entirely unpractical on the road. The German newspaper FAZ had the time to test it still and found that it is indeed practically unusable. surprise, surprise. I will now wait until enough drivers and utility support is available for Windows XP and then check it out myself. The nice design and the very low weight make it quite tempting for traveling I think also when using a larger battery that gives 6 hours of runtime.