Posts by uhuznaa 366 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Nov 2007
It may be that just my netbook fever finally has worn off, but this is so boring. What I would like to buy is a simple zero-care netbook with SSD storage, no Windows to nurse along and clever software to keep the most important data synced from and to it via the net automatically. What they try to sell me are shrunk laptops with large HD's and Windows eating my time and peace of mind.
Now, where's my iPod touch again? Ah, in the coat pocket, as always.
The NB100 has one major feature that is lacking elsewhere: You can tilt the display back flat, a full 180 degrees. The Eee's are a bit more limited here (but it's enough in most cases).
Look at the Dell Mini 9 for a really bad example. You can't get the display back far enough to actually look at it when sitting upright in a cramped space like an airplane or a train and having it on your lap. Unusable in many cases except having it sitting on a desk.
While that thing surely is not bad, it's not the music (or media) player part of the touch that makes it so great. And it's also not the touch screen. It's the fact that the iPod touch is a great PDA, eBook reader, mail reader, browsing device and generally a nice small computer with lots of apps available. The two devices are just totally different gadgets.
If you have followed the digicam market and its megapixel-madness, you'll know how this works.
If the manufacturers were sane they would use a (fast) 16GB SSD for the system and for apps and then include four SD-card slots for data storage, so you could extend the memory cheaply and as you need it. As long as the OS and the apps are on a fast SSD slow storage for purely data doesn't hurt that much anymore.
But they aren't sane, so almost all new netbooks look like slightly smaller notebooks with whirring fans and spinning HDs and everything. What a waste.
10" is a nice size for a netbook *if* they can get the size of the whole machine down to that. What's a 8.9" sized screen good for if it has a huge border around the screen to get the size of the machine up to something you can squeeze a usable keyboard in?
That being said I've handled an Apple MacBook Air these days and that thing is actually quite nice and small, although it is actually not that small at all. Form and design matter, too.
What's more important though is the battery of these beasts. A netbook you can carry everywhere but which lasts only two hours on a charge is virtually useless. I'm not buying anything these days that gives me less than four hours and then the market gets very, very thin indeed. I have no use for a computer I have to carry around as a dead weight because the battery is flat... The smallest netbook is to large and too heavy then.
I know that many people are moaning about the price of the new MacBook. One thing to remember: Usually Apple machines pull about 50% percent of their price when new if you sell them again a few years later. Try to sell a cheap PC notebook after three years and suddenly it'll have been expensive three years of putting up with a crappy machine.
If you look at the price over several years you will see that Macs aren't that expensive at all but excellent value for your money. Effectively you're paying pennies a day for years of bliss instead of paying more for endless anger and frustration.
While A4-sized displays are nice for reading, you won't see these in mobile devices very soon. A magazine or newspaper is thin and flexible and you can just stuff it into your bag, no matter what happens to it there (you'll throw it away rather sooner than later anyway). Totally different thing, this.
What I'd like to have: A paperback sized device with a 9" touchscreen, about 10-20mm thick. With a decent screen resolution, which is *not* used to squeeze more tiny icons and more tiny text on it, but to display a good-looking, well done user interface. Think of a scaled up iPod touch (and I don't care if it runs OS-X or Linux under it). This should be possible *today*, even with the technology that an Eee PC already has. That Asus and others instead move their products more and more back into the notebook category is plainly ironic. Keyboards and touchpads are so 20th century -- a good touchscreen with a well-done virtual keyboard and GUI does away with most of the weaknesses of such a small device.
If you google around a bit, you'll find that this thing is being hacked the hell out of it already. You *can* install Ubuntu, XP (easy) and even OS X on it (if you're brave).
By adding some more servers to the software repository list you can install many Debian packages. Of course you can install Apache and friends.
512MB RAM seem meager today, but with Linux this is more than enough, there's no need for swap space (which isn't wise to use on a flash drive anyway, too many write operations to be healthy in the long run).
The three and a half hours of battery juice is indeed a bit disappointing, but the charger seems to be small enough to toss it in the bag along with the machine, so you can top up the battery as soon as you find something to plug it into.
*Very* tempting, that thing.
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