Perhaps that's another silver lining of the global economic downturn - a turn away from "Bigger, faster, hotter" towards systems that have the minimum CPU power and electrical power consumption to get real-world tasks done. The Atom is a perfect example of showing us just how little power you can get away with using and still have something that functions as a PC. This could be a wonderful thing for power-efficient and silent PC's in the coming years.

I guess I fall into the group of people who are "saving PC sales".

My girlfriend and all of her roommates are jealous, since my brand new, teeny little $500 machine (including taxes) can do just about everything that theirs can (except gaming), and it gets 5-6 hours of regular usage battery life to boot. I've got one of her roommates on the fence with regards to getting one of his own.

Will buy the 900HA as soon as I see some good reviews. The price is perfect, and so are the technical specifications.

Whats also interesting to read is the comments under the DailyTech article. you can see some get it and some just miss the point.

makes for good lunchtime entertainment

Here's my take, since you asked. It's simple. Go to the original article Daily Tech referenced:

And read the first comment:


In a down economy, sales of cheap laptops are up. Netbooks aren't being sold to people who can't afford a $600 laptop. They're going to people who want them as a second or third computer. Among people I know on a budget, 100% of them would rather get a full-featured laptop for $600 than a netbook running linux with a 8" screen for $400.

And I would love a Dell Mini to use while traveling instead of my Dell 8600 which hardly fits under my airline seat, but it has nothing to do with the economy.

I second that! I do alot or HTML editing / research and is great on the long bus ride home. Plus the battery life just amazing at 6 hours with wireless on. I came close the draining the battery this week, but had to go to bed first.

Everyone one at work loves the machine.

Well finally people who appreciate ergonomic design can get what they want from pcs.
I will never buy a big, heavy, energy wasting, expensive standard laptop again.

fixed

I'm ont he fence myself actually... Nick, do you have access to a wacom tablet? Does it work 'trough' the screen?

Been trying to find out about this for ages, want to try a diy cintiq.[/i]

I have never found standard laptops at all plesant to use. 15" and even 17" screens are just tiny--especially widescreen versions. I am now used to using dual 20" LCDs at work, and a 32" LCD at home hardly seems large (though the pixels do). Yet even small 15" notebooks aren't very portable either.

The NEC Mobile Pro 900C I bought last year works fine as my portable system. I hardly ever use the optical drive on my desktop systems. I even thought about getting a INOi Media Tank thing (External USB 5.25" + 3.5" + flash reader) and using my Mobile Pro as my main system. Unfortunately, the old NEC is limited to the slowest USB read speed and can only display 640x240 on an external monitor.


ASUS Eee PC 700, NEC Mobile Pro 900C, HP Jornada 720

Despite being smaller than the smallest netbook, the 900C uses all of its 9.69" of width for a decent keyboard. The tiny keys were the biggest weakness of the first Eee PCs, but there are finally some netbooks with decent keyboards. Now for $350 I can get an Acer Aspire One with x86 Windows, 1 GB or memory, and 120 GB of drive space. These netbooks easily lose their size limitations when plugged into a big LCD and a normal keyboard/mouse. The Intel GMA 950 may fail at gaming, but at least it has a nice 400MHz RAMDAC that can drive up to 2048x1536@75Hz, and it can run both Aero and Quartz Extreme.

So exactly what feature is missing?

3D performance
eSATA, but USB 2.0 is okay.
DVI-type port, but VGA is okay.

Coming from my Mobile Pro, I would also like a touch screen and a Compact Flash slot (which my camera also uses). $600 laptops don't have these features. $1000 laptops have nothing better than crappy 8600GT level 3D performance. Such low end specifications are even found on the "new" $2500 MacBook Pro. I'll pass.

I am currently thinking of selling the Mobile Pro (which seems to be worth more now than when I bought it) and getting either an Acer Aspire One or ASUS Eee PC 1000HA. The ASUS looks to be better except for the right shift key size and placement. Both units have somewhat noisy fans and 5400 rpm harddrives. One review noted the Eee PC 1000H uses up to 44 W peak load / 18 W idle, which isn't great.

I am also feeling more positive about Intel Atom performance. Evidently it is possible to overclock these netbooks to 2 GHz through software, and the Atom seems to compare similarly to ULV Core Solos. Now If we could just somehow plug a $50 Geforce 9600 GSO into a netbook...

Sadly, I don't. I've heard somewhere on the echoes of the internet that the next generation of netbooks will come with touchscreen functionality built in.

Khaaaaan!

Touchscreen is no use for me, and multitouch is, well... it seems to work nice for moving fake polaroids around a screen.
Oh well, at least they still sell paper and pencil

I'm surprised no one seems to be talking about the Dell Mini9 (and reported sightings of a Mini 12 accidently splashed on one of their sites) seeing it (they) HAVE NO MOVING PARTS!!!

I bought a Wyse X90le thin client (notebook designed for remote log-in) to get a net book with no moving parts (ie total silence). It was twice the cost of the Dell Mini 9, and had so much hum from it's 15" screen (DC converters?) that it drove me crazy.

While the Mini9 is interesting, it's also been reported to run quite a bit hotter than it's competition. I'm not sure about you, but I don't want my palms to be constantly resting on something that's 40C, do you?

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