Why I don’t own a netbook …

As you might have noticed I am a big fan of gadgets and computers. A few months ago I was about to buy a small netbook for my needs. Fortunately I borrowed one from a neighbour for a few days. That was a lousy experience.  Cramped keyboard, slow processor and inexistent battery life. I usually understand the limitations imposed by small and cheap devices, but I didn’t thought that I’ll get all of them. I mean I can put up with a slow machine if it has good battery life, or with a lower battery life but better performance. Add to that some limitation imposed by the XP license - like 1 Gb of RAM. I get better use out of my Nokia N800 internet tablet anyday. Besides that I find the netbooks I checked out loud and hot. Again two features that should exclude each other - it’s either a slow fan with a big heatsink heating a bigger surface of the laptop meaning a quiet machine either the other way around.

We have an older Toshiba M100 that my wife uses which has always been silent. The only time that I hear it’s fan is when I encode video files on it. And even then I notice it, it’s still quiet. I would expect a small machine, with an extremely efficeint cpu to be silent.

I still think that I’ll get a laptop just for me in the future but for now I think I’ll go with a thin and light 12" or 13" laptop that usually costs only a bit more than a netbook and still sports double the ram, a dual core cpu, double battery life and only a bit more weight.

By the way, I see more and more manufacturers pushing 12" netbooks. Why? It’s enough to call it a netbook to be able to sell it with an insuficient battery, slow cpu, crap on board graphics ?

I know that netbooks are all the rage today but I sure am happy that I didn’t buy one.

2013 update

Ha. While reorganizing my categories I stumbled onto this one. By the looks of it I was quite right 🙂 Netbooks are on their way out with tablets being mostly to blame. It turns out I was quite right.