Seeking Opinions: Netbooks

I suspect that there is a netbook in my near-term future. My travel to and from Toronto last week reinforced this sense. At three hours that flight is about as long as you’d want to be on a 50 seat regional jet. Such is the reality of air travel these days. Smaller aircraft are being used on longer flights so that they can still offer a few flights a day on less traveled routes. While really do like my HP NX8510p notebook it’s just too large to be useful in small spaces, like on a regional jet.

Further, a lot of the stuff that I’m doing these days is “in-the-cloud” as they say. So many of my activities don’t require major applications installed on the platform before me. It would seem that a netbook with some reasonable amount of local storage would make some sense for me. I’m not sure I’d go for one with inboard 3G ‘net access. They seem to costly at the moment.

Tim Higgins over at Small Net Builder has been in a protracted search for a netbook. He’s actually taken delivery of three different models;

• MSI Wind U100
• Samsung NC-10
• Lenovo IdeaPad S-10

Each of these he ended up returning fairly quickly after discovering some show-stopping aspect of the device. In a recent email he told me that he’s jut received a Dell Mini 12 as his next candidate, but was also quite taken with the forthcoming HP 2140 (pictured) which he saw at CES 2009.

Tim has a really clear idea of what he wants, what works and what doesn’t. I suspect that whatever he settles on has got to be very good.

I also thought that perhaps I should inquire with a broader group of users. And so I find myself asking;

1. Do you own a netbook?
2. If so, what make/model?
3. Would you recommend it?
4. Why?