Small is beautiful

The idea behind the Netbook phenomenon is very simple. Ultimately small and cheap.

Never has the adage “Pile em high and sell em cheap” been more apt than in the netbook market.

Don’t expect to find any high end components or performance in this  sector although you will find an abundance of quality products.

Expect basic CPU’s often such as the Intel Atom,  small hard drives are the order of the day or sometimes just flash memory storage.

Optical drives are a rarity in a netbook to make these babies as portable and affordable as possible.

As far as operating systems go there has been something of a mix. Vista home basic has been popular in the past as well as various incarnations of Linux.

Recently Microsoft has realised the value of this market and has extended the Windows XP license to include netbooks at a reduced cost.

To meet the criteria for this cut price XP OS the screen must be no larger than 10.2 Inches, RAM is limited to 1Gb and the hard drive must be no larger than 160Gb.

Needless to say Linux can be a bit daunting for most of us who have grown up in the world of Windows and because of this XP is firmly taking over as the OS of choice.

Vista is just too power hungry and slow to load not to mention expensive so expect to see this phased out this year in favour of the cut price version of windows XP home.

Battery life can be an issue with netbooks as many of them ship with a 3 cell battery pack which is often only good for 2 to 3 hours use.

As the whole idea of owning a netbook is the ability to carry it around and use it anywhere and everywhere it makes sense to go for the biggest battery pack you can find.

With one of these by your side why would you want a smartphone with its clumsy interface and useless keyboard

Models like the Asus Eee PC 901 and the Samsung NC10 pack a 6 cell battery which should be good for between 5 and 7 hours.

802.11 b or g Wifi is standard netbook fayre and some models also come equipped with an integral HSDPA modem which means you can access mobile broadband without needing a dongle.

2008 saw the birth of the netbook and worldwide sales were astounding. In the 3rd Quarter of 2008 5.61 Million netbooks shipped which was a 160% increase on the previous quarter.  The UK market has never been slow to embrace new technological ideas and the netbook is no different.

You can keep up to date with all the latest netbook releases here at netbookplanet.co.uk

Expect the Netbook to really come of age in 2009.

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