Netbooks

I had, on many occassions, reviewed a few netbooks off and on and I believed that netbooks are quite useful to many people. For once, they are quite cheap to buy (around £150-£400 excluding Sony's Vaio P and HP's AMD Yukon based netbooks). Look at the current laptop market. A typical laptop with 15" would cost someone around £400-£500. Although the said laptop is equipped with a better cpu (dual core as opposed to a single core with Hyperthreading technology), it is said to be much heavier and it defeats portability. With a laptop, you can install more memory and most of the time, you will be getting a better graphics card as opposed to a netbook. However, it is arguable that some of the laptops in town are using integrated graphics card and it provides no gain to those people buying a laptop as the performance between a netbook and a laptop have been blured.

Having said that, we have to look into the advantages and disadvantages of owning a netbook.


Advantages

• Cheap and Cheerful - Most of the netbooks are priced around £150-£400 for a brand new unit, it is very affordable for an average consumer taking into account the current economy climate. Although the UK's economy is picking up, it will take more time for people to be able to spend more for luxury goods.
• Portability - A netbook is very light as compared to an average laptop. One good example will be the Asus Eee PC range. A typical Asus Eee PC will only weigh in at around 1.1kg. That is pretty impressive considering that it has everything a laptop has saved for an optical drive. The optical drive might not be essential for a netbook as most of the stuff would have been installed on the hard drive itself.
• Long Lasting Battery - One good thing about netbooks will be where they score in long lasting battery life. Take a good example will be the Asus Eee PC 'Sea Shell' range... Asus boost the ability of the netbook to be used for up to 8 hours in a single charge. That is, however, one does not use the netbook for graphics or cpu intensive work. The upcoming Nokia Booklet 3G netbook will offer consumers a battery life for up to 12 hours in a single charge. I'm pretty impressed with it taking into account that Nokia has decided to implement the Atom Z530 and not the Z520 as one would be able to find in the Dell Mini range and also on the Acer 751h, not forgetting about on some of the Sony Vaio P range netbooks.

Disadvantages

• Insufficient Firepower - It is assumed that if you are looking at using a maximum of 8w TDP from a typical netbook, you are not going to get the same level of firepower as opposed to a laptop.
• Short of room for improvement - As netbook goes, you can't really have much of a choice to do any upgrades with it too. The most which one would be able to do is to increase the memory capacity of the netbook. Not every manufacturer will allow you to do so. One good example will be the Dell Mini 12. You can't upgrade the system's memory from 1GB to 2GB as the chipset will not be able to read more than 1GB of memory! Another thing to be concerned is the cpu itself. Some manufacturers will solder the cpu onto the motherboard so anyone will not be able to upgrade the cpu. Oh well, ask yourself - Will you want to upgrade the cpu anyway? It's much better to buy a new netbook, right?