A contenscious issue, netbooks. Either you love 'em or you hate 'em. Me personally? Well I'm a lover. I own a Dell mini 9 running the Linux distro Ubuntu 9.04 and for me it works. One of the first questions people ALWAYS ask me when they see I have a netbook is, "How powerful is it?" (1.6GHz N270 Intel Atom Processor, 1GB DDR2 533MHz, Intel GMA 950 Integrated Graphics seeing as you asked). Alright I'm not about to render the title sequence for my latest film project on it but thats not the point. The point is mobility and not having to hulk a breezeblock about the place. I can throw it in my bag and run and with the SSD drive I don't have to worry about damaging hard drive platters. I can edit documents and blog posts such as this one. I can use GIMP to edit photos and have even used it to design logos for thegrainsilo.com, lifeinthecloud.co.uk and avinagiraffe.com. And with the use of its onboard HSDPA modem, I can even post remotely with full control of my blogs dashboard.
Cramped
One of the main issues with a netbook is its keyboard. There are a lot of complaints about the size and how cramped it is. Whilst I admit it was not ideal at first, with a little practice, it is something I have gotten used to. I think mainly on this, people have become used to the wide keyboard standard. Scale this down in anyway and it seems to throw most people. Having said that when I'm at home I do have an external keyboard which I plugin but this is simply because the netbook itself is up on a stand and I would probably do myself an injury reaching up and across my desk on a sustained basis.
Stream that media
Bringing me nicely to my next point. When I am in my home network and in front of my main computer I use the netbook to stream Spotify and any other media/media services I may be watching/listening to on the side. This serves two uses; 1. It saves on processing power when I'm using memory hungry software like Photoshop or Dreamweaver on my main box. 2. I don't have to flick between screens to change songs or media and therefore it's less of a distraction to my main work.
Sticking with the streaming media, I also use my mini box of wonder to stream, either directly from my home server or from Boxee, films, webcasts and other media direct to my TV. Whilst there were teething tech problems in the initial setup of this (mainly soundtracks falling out of sync with the video and stuttering video files) which I have now sorted, overall it does run smoothly. With the use of the Boxqueue bookmarklet I can save any internet video file directly to my Boxee queue for viewing on the TV at a later time. And used in conjunction with the GMote application on my G1 I can access the file server from the phone and not even have to get up from my seat to change media!
Playing with the 'Bu
In terms of OS I use the Canonical Linux distro Ubuntu (9.04). When I first got the machine it was running XP but I wanted to try something new. This has worked out very well. The distro itself is open source and free and pretty much anything that I ran in Windows can either be run under Wine (Windows Emulator) or there is a viable alternative available within the Open Source community somewhere. The ability to switch desktops is very cool, especially on a small screen and with the Compiz settings manager you can do it in extreme style. Another bonus of using Ubuntu is that with the use of the Google mobile OS Androids SDK you can run Android apps on your netbook (See my Top 5 Android Apps). This works very well with apps like Gmote, Shazam or even the recently released Qik and also means I can integrate my phone even further with my computer.
Support not replace
Overall I would say netbooks are not meant to be a replacement for your main PC. However as a secondary device working in conjuction with your main box/network they work and they work well. According to recent research from NPD 58% of the people who buy netbooks are satisfied with their purchase compared to 70% of regular laptop buyers. This I believe, is down to a misunderstanding of what these micro machines can actually do. There has to be some sacrifice for the size and mobility of the machines themselves. Having said that, the advancing of processor technologies and the development of smaller solid state drives these machines will only get faster and better in the future.
-Pip
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