I have been scouring the net to find a good deal for a netbook. For the uninitiated, a netbook is a small laptop with a screen thats around 9 inches wide diagonally and weighs about 1 kg. Its processing power is limited and cannot be used to run heavy programs like games or matlab. Most models cant run windows vista, but who cares about that? The most popular models are Asus ee PC, MSI wind, Acer aspire one and Dell inspiron mini. Lenovo, HP, Toshiba and Sony also have models though they not as popular as the others due to the high cost.
Apart from its small size and light weight, the good ones also have upto 7 hrs of battery life. Its usually priced between $250 - $400. I think it makes sense to buy one as a second computer for use while travelling and also while going for lectures when you might want to look up pdfs or chat on gtalk. My current laptop is about 3.5 kgs and its a pain carrying it around.
That said when I looked deeper into the details this does not seem to be the best time for such a purchase. The machines have a processor called the Intel Atom. It is power efficient but not powerful. Benchmarks show that the performance of a 1.6 GHz Atom is almost same as that of an older Intel processor, celeron M 900 MHz. The Intel platform seems to be unnecessarily costly, atleast thats what the tech forums say.
Other processors for netbooks like an ARM based Freescale chip, which would be much more power efficient, are slated for release later this year. Another reason to wait is the impending release of NVIDIAs ION platform which will make the systems much more graphics capable. Also the pricing seems to be wrong. Dell sells their bare bones model for $249, but had just 3 weeks back sold a few refurbished peices in the outlet website for $174. I believe when newer models are released many of the older ones will be available for less than $200. So wait, if not for the newer chips atleast for lower prices.
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