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About Michael J. Miller

Miller, who was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine from 1991 to 2005, authors this blog for PC Magazine to share his thoughts on PC-related products.  No investment advice is offered in this blog.  All duties are disclaimed.  Miller works separately for a private investment firm which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made. 

Living With A Netbook: The Good, The Bad, and The Just Plain Too Small

Everyone is talking about "netbooks" these days, those mini notebooks with smaller screens, slower processors, but the promise of lightweight, take-anywhere computing.  I've done a few posts on these machines, but hadn't really used one myself for any length of time.(Instead, I like ultraportable business laptops such as the ThinkPad X301, but those are much more expensive machines.)I had tried some netbooks with 8-inch display, but they just seemed way too small for me, so when some 10-inch versions came out, I wanted to give them a try.  I tested three different netbooks, and came away seeing both the promise and the problems with current netbooks. 

Since my colleague Cisco Cheng has already done full reviews of most of the netbooks, I won't bother with full reviews, but instead, just give my general impressions: To begin with, all three notebooks are very similar in their basic specifications: all had 10-inch displays, a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270, integrated 945G graphics, 1 GB of memory and Windows XP.As a result, most benchmark results, there were only small differences (with one exception I'll mention in a later post).All are available with either 3 or 6 cell batteries; the 3-cell ones fit within the basic design, with the 6-cell ones sticking out the back a bit. 

The Acer Aspire One is a nice example of the basics of this market. It
has the basic complements of ports, including one VGA port, Ethernet,
Wi-Fi, and three USB ports.  I was glad to see a slot that can read SD
cards as well as memory stick pro, but it's missing an express card
slot. With a white plastic outside and a black interior, it's a
reasonable looking machine, but I found the keyboard a bit cramped for
my taste; and in particular, I wish it had a real right mouse
button. Instead, you press the left side of the small mouse button under
the touch pad for left and the right side for right.  It worked, but I
found myself frustrated by the keyboard sometimes. 

The Lenovo Ideapad S10 follows in that vein, but adds a few refinements. The unit I tested had a black exterior and a white interior.  While the touchpad is still pretty small, at least it has two buttons. Lenovo made the general typing keys a bit larger by shrinking thins like the right hand shift key (now with the up arrow key intruding between it and the "/" key, which certainly took some getting used to) and doubling up the F11 and F12 keys.  It's not a great keyboard, but it seems an improvement.  Again, this unit had a 6-cell battery that extended beyond the case, but it's available with a 3-cell battery as well.  It has an SD slot and an express card slot. The slot isn't as deep as those on a typical notebook, so a WAN card would extend out of the case, but at least it's there.  It has VGA out, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and two USB slots.  Again, it seemed to work well for what it is. 

The HP Mini 2141 is the same class of hardware, but I found some of the little touches to make it easier to use. The basic design is aluminum, and that makes it look a little more professional than the other units. More importantly, the keyboard extends edge to edge, allow for larger keys. While this is still technically a 92% keyboard, I found it much easier to type on, and to me, that's really important.  The touch pad is considerably wider, with the mouse buttons on the sides, which is unusual, but worked pretty well for me. It has two USB ports, one of which is powered (presumably for an external optical drive), an ExpressCard 34 slot (again, your card would likely stick out the side), and an SD card slot.  It just felt a little more professional to me; though on the flip side, it looks like it costs a bit more. 

As I mentioned, keyboard size was an issue for me, but I found the HP surprisingly reasonable.  I was able to run word processing (both Microsoft Word and OpenOffice) just fine on all of the machines, though I did find I had to do a lot more scrolling than I'm normally used to. 

The other big issue is display size.10-in seems good enough for lots of uses, but the resolution is limited:The Acer and Lenovo systems have 1024 by 600 resolution displays, with the HP offering a slightly smaller 1024 by 576.(HP has announced a 1366 by 768 display but I haven't seen one.)  This makes for lots of vertical scrolling on all sorts of web pages.(I noticed this more on the Acer, which comes with both Google and McAfee toolbars pre-installed for IE, though of course you can remove those).This was particularly noticeable on mail sites when you want to see a preview of the mail message.  Yahoo Mail, for instance, tells you its new look doesn't work right on sites less than 1024 by 768, and it isn't kidding (the reading pane is basically useless on that size.)But it's an issue on a number of web sites, though in general, web browsing worked fairly well on all the machines. 

In general, though, basic web browsing worked pretty well for me.  Most sites come in fine, and that includes basic video on sites like YouTube and Hulu.  I did notice a lot of problem with HD video - aside from the problem of it not fitting on the screen, the machines just couldn't keep up with the streams.(I'll talk more about performance later.) 

The big advantages these machines have are portability and price - as such they do make sense for a lot of users, particularly in this economy.  But they aren't going to replace a full notebook for me.  I find I'm more productive on a larger screen, and for some applications I run, I need a faster processor.  Others will really miss an internal optical drive.  Obviously, gamers will want a much more powerful machine, but most of the little notebooks I like to carry wouldn't work for them either. 

But there are lots of people who have a desktop for their more powerful needs, and just want a secondary machine that is very portable and handles simple web browsing and email. For that, any of these machines will more than suffice. 

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