Many of the scenarios for which people used to lug a laptop or notebook computer around can now be handled on public or loaner computers, with just a USB flash drive in your pocket, open-source portable applications modified to run from the USB drive, and a synchronized copy of one's data and document files. For more on this technology, see my portable apps page in this section. One might still want a netbook or subnotebook for business travel, or to use in a coffeehouse or bakery with free WiFi but no loaner computers.
My suggestions:
I started out trying to concentrate here on netbooks with near-standard key-pitch of 92% or more. If you have really small hands, or you are a two-finger typist, you have smaller netbook options. It's been sort of morphing into writing about interesting netbooks. I think key-pitch should be expressed as edge-to-edge distance across keys, if not in millimeters then as a percentage of the 19mm (¾ inch) of a standard keyboard. It's often unclear if that's what the percentages cited online mean. It would be much clearer to just give the dimension in millimeters, which may be exactly why they don't.
You can measure key-pitch on a keyboard more easily and accurately by measuring, in centimeters, across the ten keys of the home row, from the left edge of the A key to the left edge of the quotes key, then cite the number you get as millimeters. Or you can measure across five keys from A to H and double it. Nineteen millimeters isn't exactly three-quarters of an inch, of course, but it's very close.
Some netbook lines come with 2½-inch or 1.8-inch hard disks, some with flash-memory solid-state disk replacements, and some lines let you choose. A solid-state flash disk should reduce power consumption and extend your usage time between charges. The down side is that flash memory can be expected to fail eventually, requiring replacement and a restore of the OS at that time. You may want to avoid the 1.8-inch hard disks if you can; they tend to be significantly slower than the 2½-inch drives that have been the norm for laptops.
If you're looking for a definition of netbook, that's what my calculus teacher used to describe as a non-trivial problem. I would say they are small, light, cheap, and never have internal optical or diskette drives. (These days, if you have two or three USB ports, an SD memory-card slot, and WiFi, who needs 'em?) Beyond that, see the Wikipedia netbook article linked below right, including the arguments on the discussion page. Perhaps the real definition has yet to be hammered out in the marketplace, between the buyers and the sellers. I know what I'd like to see: make 'em with 19mm/100% full key-pitch and a great keyboard, even if it means it's 11 inches long instead of 10.
If you're ever in a coffeehouse or restaurant and available WiFi seems to be locked, ask the staff. Some places provide free Internet, but prefer to just give customers the password on request. Of course, some places only have the lame kind of wireless that requires you to have an account with AT&T or Sprint or somebody, and get billed monthly. I tend to avoid those places whenever other options are available.
Some other mobile hardware and links of interest:
For the moment, netbooks and notebooks probably mostly get online with free WiFi hotspots, at coffeehouses, library branches, oil-change places, laundromats, downtown-association sponsored coverage in some cities, and so forth. Reportedly the coming thing is cellular wireless. At the moment this is mostly supported by USB dongles, for a monthly fee. Eventually if it takes off the way people expect, the cellular component should be built in, as WiFi and Bluetooth usually are now, and there should be some competitive downward pressure on pricing.
Likely accessories and peripherals for netbooks and notebooks:
An interesting article The Netbook Effect in Wired 17.03 (March 2009) said netbooks were an unintended disruptive innovation, originating with stuff developed for the OLPC program; Wikipedia agrees. People in business selling $1,000 mega-laptops apparently were very unhappy about the sudden popularity of stripped-down compact $250-$300 netbooks. Lots of them seem to be in actual denial about it, insisting it's a dumb idea even as netbooks are selling like hotcakes everywhere.
Discussing the original ASUS netbooks with 4GB of flash memory in place of a hard disk, the Wired article said "That's so small you need to host all your pictures, videos, and files online—and install minimal native software—because there's simply no room inside your machine." Then in Wired 17.05 (May) a Rants letter asked "What happens if you don't have the cloud?"
I don't agree that a netbook has to be dependent on the cloud. Unless you want to have massive files, like tons of multi-megapixel digital photos, videos, or digitized movies, even 4GB should be plenty of room to install Puppy Linux, OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird POP-mail, the GIMP and Inkscape for raster and vector graphics, and more, with at least a couple gigabytes left for your document files. I had most of that installed in the form of portable apps on a 4GB USB drive, for about six months. 8GB or 16GB is more common on netbooks now anyway, and with even 8GB you could probably use Ubuntu Linux. As of August 2009 64GB solid-state netbooks were already available, although a little pricey by netbook standards. Windows 7, the version after Vista, is supposed to have netbook support.
Most people wouldn't want a netbook as their only computer, I'll give you that, but there's no reason they can't be functional offline.
Google seems to be very interested in the idea of netbooks running their Google OS, but the thinking seems to be very much in the cloud-dependent direction. Certainly free Google OS will be interesting to netbook makers from a marketing perspective, compared to prices for netbooks with Windows; Linux benefits from the same price swing. Microsoft is even said to be charging netbook OEMs more for Windows 7 than they did for XP, which seems like kind of an odd move on their part.
People also tend to overreact to the smaller displays of netbooks, sometimes designing interfaces that almost look like they were meant for a big smartphone, or something else that might fit in a pocket. Of course, some netbooks are pocket-size. My HP Mini's basic video mode is 1024×576 pixels (16:9 HDTV aspect ratio) at 24 bits-per-pixel true color. 1024×768 (4:3) is still the most common display resolution used by all Internet visitors to this site. So with Firefox in normal mode, I see Web pages in a way very similar horizontally to lots of users, but a little shorter vertically, and if I press F11 and full-screen the browser, banishing the title bar, menu bar, and toolbar, I see about what lots of non-netbook users see in their normal browser mode.
In the rise of the netbook, I think we have something I've been wanting for a long time: the PC reduced to its practical ultimate in compactness, portability, and energy efficiency, in the form of a minimum functional keyboard without numeric keypad, a small display to match, and solid-state storage.
I think some of the people who sell notebooks and netbooks can't face the idea that netbook sales are going to reduce the sales of those $1000 super-notebooks, with every imaginable feature crammed in. So they want to believe that power users will always want the super-notebooks, and these new small cheap netbooks must be for people who either don't understand very much or don't want to do very much. Well, I'm sorry, but some people—me, for one—just want really small, light, cheap computers. That doesn't make me a dummy.
During an April conference call to analysts, Apple COO Tim Cook said about netbooks, "They have cramped keyboards, terrible software, junky hardware, very small screens, and just not a consumer experience, and not something that we would put the Mac brand on, quite frankly. And so, it’s not a space as it exists today that we are interested in, nor do we believe that customers in the long term would be interested in. It’s a segment we would choose not to play in." It's rather stunning that this was said in April 2009, when it had been clear to most people for at least a year that interest in Linux and Windows netbooks was very strong. Netbooks were flying off shelves even at $300 at the time, with prices falling to $200 and maybe even $100 by the end of the year. These are no-strings prices I'm talking about, with no wireless contract involved.
Certainly there have been netbooks, especially early on, where I would say the designers pushed too hard for small, with too-tight key pitch, too-small screens, and limited software suites. Now we have netbooks from Dell, HP, MSI, and others, which are much nicer.
Linux Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, was interviewed by DistroWatch, mostly about other stuff, back in January 2009 at a Linux conference in New Zealand. He said, "I've actually long been in the camp of people who think that laptops should be small and light and not to be used as desktop replacements. So I think that netbooks are really just 'laptops done right'." Me too. This notion of getting rid of the stationary tower-case PC, and having only a big flashy laptop with all possible bells and whistles, has always seemed a bit perverse to me.
I think I still want to have that no-compromises tower-case PC at home, though, with figurative hair on its figurative chest. Or maybe two. For one thing, if your netbook has a 16GB or 32GB solid-state hard disk replacement, you can install quite a bit of software, but probably you wouldn't want to put an entire copy of Windows on there to use with a virtual machine package. As I discuss at greater length on my Linux pages, if you have both a Linux and a Windows PC next to each other, you can network them and experiment with VNC remote login.
I think in the near term all three schools of thought about portable computers will probably have lots of adherents; the thin netbook or cloud-device school at one extreme, the big-notebook desktop-replacement fans at the other, and what I think of as the happy medium, those of us who don't expect a netbook to completely replace a muscular desktop-style non-mobile PC, but do expect it to remain functional and useful when not connected to the Internet.
Some UI tweaks to reclaim scarce screen area on smallish netbook displays.
| OpenOffice.org office suite |
Go to Tools, Options, OOo, View, User Interface, Icon size and style, and change the icon size from Large to Small. You should also know about OOo's View, Full Screen or Ctrl-Shift-J. |
| Firefox Web browser |
Right-click your Toolbar, select Customize, and check Use Small Icons. This one doesn't make all that much difference; you may prefer to stick with the default large icons. Of course, you also have View, Full Screen or F11 in Firefox. |
| Ubuntu Linux OS |
At System, Preferences, Appearance, Interface tab, change Toolbar button labels from the default Text below items to Text beside items. That will make toolbars in lots of things like gedit skinnier. Some apps including the Geany editor ignore this OS-level setting; Geany has its own toolbar settings. |
Of course, besides trying to put Firefox on a diet, at least part of the time you can just use Google Chrome as is, which by design uses more screen for the page. Firefox and Chrome can each do stuff the other can't. Chrome's been really stable in my experience from the first Windows beta, and I've been having decent results with the Linux beta as well. You still have F11 full screen as in Firefox.
System and application dialog boxes are often designed now assuming a minimum display size 1024 pixels wide by 768 high (1024×768). Netbook displays often don't have that much height, so the the action buttons at the bottom of the dialog (like Cancel, OK) may not be visible. Get used to the following keystroke sequence: Alt-Spacebar, M (Move) up-arrow, Enter. That will move the top of the dialog box up beyond the top of the display. You can press the up-arrow key more than once if you need to, of course.
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