Whether you call them ultraportables, subnotebooks, netbooks, or tiny laptops, you’re talking more or less about the same thing: small and light form factor, limited capacity and capability, and (hopefully) less than or around $500. There are so many out there, though! Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, MSI and more are all in on the game, and with such a flurry of options and feature sets, it’s easy to forget to take stock of what we want fundamentally from these things.
This little guide is a good cheat sheet for what we need in a netbook. It essentially comes down to: decent build, decent keyboard, small but good screen, capabilities and hardware in line with what it’s intended for, and a fair amount of built-in connectivity. Sounds about right, but you’ll probably find that even your favorite netbook will fall short in one or more of these areas. Venezuela doesn’t seem like they’re willing to wait, however, having just ordered a million classmate PCs from Intel. “Good enough” might be good enough for them, but you can afford to be a little more picky.
Linux as an option or standard OS would be at the top of my list. Companies that force their customers to pay the Windows Tax are obviously not serious about selling ‘affordable’ netbooks. For me the ultimate netbook would have a 10″ LED backlit screen with 768 horizontal lines, 802.11n wireless, a keyboard layout with no mis-shapen or misplaced keys, and an SSD drive (spinning disks in a tossible form factor really misses the point). Lastly, designed with thermal managment in mind so it doesn’t double as a hotplate.
totally with you on linux. it’s the perfect platform for a computer with the basic capabilities we’re looking for. And as for heat management, yeah, but they should also be modest in the machine’s hardware so it’s not even capable of getting that hot.