More Thoughts About NetBooks

As Netbooks proliferate I find them accumulating. I've bought more than a dozen of them, with at least four being presents of teenagers as birthday, Bar Mitzvah or holiday season presents.

At last count my wife is using six various versions in her medical practice in addition to her uber netbook on steroids, the Flybook V5. She's got her own Asus eeePC 1000 HE to mirror one of mine, as well as an Asus 901 and Asus 1000H in both Linux and Windows flavors and her current flavor of the month, the Gigabyte M912 which is a tablet PC like version with a touchscreen that's perfect for he medical note taking. Somewhere in the office (or house) she has a converted from Linux to Windows early rendition of the Acer Aspire One.

I've got a similar number of Netbooks including the following:

Acer Aspire One White (Linux converted to Windows with SSD)

Acer Aspire One Black (Windows XP 3G 160 GB HD)

Asus S101 (Windows XP)

Asus 1000HE (Windows XP)

Asus 1000H (Windows XP)

Asus 901 (Windows XP)

Asus 900 (Linux)

Asus (701) (Linux)

Flybook V5

Overkill---yup. Understanding of what's what...Certainly. What makes them different..They are like bags. Each has a different purpose and besides, someone needs to evaluate them from a buyers' perspective.

For example, as an executive the Asus S101 hands down is the one to carry. Perhaps the best of everything, except hard disk size. Sleek. Stylish. Professional. Fast. All its missing is on-board 3G. The Asus 1000HE with the newer and better Intel N280 works much better with video playback than the Asus 1000H which has better audio (just slightly) as it has Dolby audio. The Asus 901 is a tight and fast little sports car. It has all the power of the 1000H but in a smaller package, my only lament is I opted for an SSD (solid state drive, vs. a real Hard Disk. As for the 701 and 900 from Asus-they were nice experiments, but really, I have little use for Linux other than as a dumb terminal or as devices to access the cloud based world. Still these are the first two that really set the trend.

Now onto the Acer Aspire Ones. Dollar for dollar, the best value around. Only rub I have remains the touch pad and mouse button configurations. The 8.9" Aspire One can be had for between $300 and $350 dollars if you hunt around. Start with Amazon. If you want on board 3G (which rocks) I suggest heading to a local Radio Shack store. For $99 (plus a contract for mobile data at $59.00 a month or so) you can have one. If you can care less about 3G, and just want to use WiFi, the best dollar for dollar buy is the newest Acer Aspire One in the 10" size. But for a few dollars more the Asus 1000HE is the one to go with if you want all the Acer would offer, but in a slightly more powerful package.

One other note, I've found the Asus Netbooks have less far less issues connecting to a wider variety of 802.11 access points (especially Apple Airport Extremes and Time Capsules.)

So what should you buy? It comes down to price and performance. And that is a personal choice, but if Asus would create a 3G S101 with a 160 GB HD and 2 Gigs of on board RAM, style, size and performance would be what would win me over. So for now, the nod goes to Asus over Acer (just slightly) but to be fair, you should also consider the Samsung line of Netbooks too. They're performance scores and comments from friends I trust tell me they are worthy contenders for the NetBook crown.

Comments

[Peter Yorke]

I love my NetBook. It saved me many a back ache.

I have the Asus 1000H and upgraded is to 2GB of RAM