Netting the best Netbooks

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Netting the best Netbooks

Rohan Naravane, Dec 15, 2008 1417 hrs IST

These little 'bundles of joy' are ready to take over the world. We look at the best ones available today.

Portability has been the mantra of the future. Beginning from computers that occupied an entire room, to desktops, laptops and finally handheld devices like smart-phones, evolution has certainly shrunk our beloved PC. In early days, laptops could never measure up to the desktops in terms of their raw power. But nowadays, the performance gap between desktops and laptops has reduced vastly.

However, in their competition with desktops, laptops had to sacrifice two important aspects; one is portability and the other is battery life. While 15-inch+ screen sizes increased the laptops footprint, the power-hungry resources (e.g. discreet graphics and faster hard drives) shortened their battery life.

For people who wanted a truly handy option, a limited number of ultra-portable laptops were available in the market since long. But they failed to become popular due to their 'ultra-high' price tag.

Here's where sub-notebooks came into the picture. The revolution was started by the Asus's Eee PC. Later we saw many manufacturers make a beeline for their own iteration of the sub-notebook. The sub-notebooks were christened 'Netbook' by Intel and it is well-known how popular they have become.

The original Netbooks had quite a few shortcomings; the keyboards were cramped, the screens were too small and they weren't really powerful to run even Windows XP smoothly. But the second wave managed to improve on the drawbacks.

So, basically a Netbook by today's definition is an ultra-portable computer with a screen and keyboard smaller than your average laptop, and is adequately powered to run specific tasks like web-browsing, multi-media etc. The only thing missing from a Netbook as compared to a laptop (other than power, of course) is an internal optical drive.

The major advantages these machines offer are;

1) Portability - With most of the Netbooks ranging from 1 to 1.5 kg, they are pretty light as compared to laptops. Their smaller footprint makes it easier to just slip them into any standard backpack and take them with you wherever you go.

2) Battery Life - Most of the current Netbooks are powered by Intel's Atom processor that is tweaked for utilizing low power. Also, factors like smaller screens, missing optical drives, use of SSDs instead of traditional spinning hard disks and high-capacity 6-cell battery options give most Netbooks a good 3-5 hour battery life. Thus, they are true road-warriors and won't make you run to that power-port frequently.

And finally, 3) Price - Unlike ultra-portable laptops that cost Rs. 80,000 upwards, Netbooks are priced between an affordable range of Rs. 20 and 25k - total value for money I'd say.

Today we are going to round up most of the currently available models and declare the 'Best' Netbook overall and the 'Best Value' Netbook.

Most Netbooks available today have a screen size of 8.9-inch or 10.2-inch. Now since most of the models have similar hardware, I won't repeat it over and over again. All of them have the following common specifications - an Intel Atom N270 1.6 Ghz processor, 1 GB RAM, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g and a Memory Card Reader.