Netbooks - Hands On Review

The other day I was wandering around Best Buy and noticed that they had a few netbooks for sale. I stopped by because I've considered using one for presentations and some light travel, instead of lugging around my full sized notebook. Vacations, maybe short trips, things where I don't need to full horsepower of my main laptop, and to reduce the risk of carrying it around everywhere.

All of these netbooks ran Windows XP, and I'm sure most people are familiar with XP, so there isn't anything major to test there. What did I look at? I checked out the following:

• Display
• Keyboard
• Size and weight

The three notebooks were these three, with the prices I found in the store:

• HP - Mini 1030NR
• Acer Aspire One
• Asus EePC

My impressions of these three devices are below:

HP Mini 1030NR

This was the only device that I couldn't physically pick up as it was locked with some bar device and I didn't have time to try and get a salesman to unlock it. Actually I didn't feel like talking to a salesman. However it felt light and small, perhaps slightly smaller than the Aspire in depth, slightly wider, perhaps heavier, but these are all lightweight machines.

The keyboard here was really good. My test was to pop open Notepad and type a few sentences, include capitals, periods, backspace, etc. The keys worked well for me, were a good size, and easy to hit without a lot of mistakes.

The display looked good, it's 10" and is a good size for working with text and writing, browsing would be a little tight compare with the Toshiba Qosmio I normally use.

Later I found this has Wireless G and a 60GB HDD.

Asus EEE PC

I ran into one of these in September or October and thought it was cool. At the time that one ran Linux, so I was concerned about using some of the apps I would want to use here, like Powerpoint.

I picked this up and it's light. It's something you could easily carry around, and if it were smaller, it would be a like a heavy point-and-shoot camera in a jacket pocket. It's larger than that, slightly larger than the Kindle and felt larger than the HP. More a 4:3 ratio where the HP is more 16:4 ratio. I'm not sure if those are accurate, but those were my impressions.

Typing was easy on there, though the shift keys are to the far right and left of other keys and I struggled slightly to hit them. After a few minutes, however, it became easier, so I think this keyboard would work for my writing. This device also has Wireless-N, a big plus for me. I need to check if the HP has that. You have the option of a 16GB SSD here as well.

Acer Aspire One

This is the smallest device I tried and it is small. It feels like a kid's Leapfrog laptop or something and the white and pink colors didn't help. It's not quite small enough for a pocket, but it's close. This device is about the size of my Kindle, although thicker.

The display here felt really small, and at 8" or so, it's much smaller than the others. It looked bright enough and had enough resolution, but I felt it was small.

However the killer here was the keyboard. It's just too small for me. I couldn't ever get the shift keys or the backspace to work without looking for them and lifting my hands, something I'm not willing to do. Perhaps if you had smaller hands, it would work for you. Definitely try this one out if you type from memory or touch type. I spent 5 minutes or so and couldn't get this to work for me and I'm not confident I ever would.

Result

If I had to buy one today, it would be the Asus, but I'd like to find out more about what will actually run on these machines.