Ultralights, MacBook Air and Netbooks, Oh My - Netbooks
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Netbooks
The netbook is a new arrival on the portable computing scene. Netbooks have
roots in the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) initiative, which was created to put
low-cost, low-power PCs into the hands of the world’s poorest children. The
initiative paved the way for the technology that has made netbooks feasible.
Most netbooks feature Intel’s Atom processor, a small SSD
(solid-state drive) and a 10-inch screen, and weigh in at around 4 pounds. The
majority lack optical drives and many other items considered to be frills by
most manufacturers. Most netbooks are running either Linux of Microsoft Windows
XP operating systems.
Leading examples include the Asus Eee PC 1000, Dell Mini 10, Lenovo IdeaPad
S10, Hewlett-Packard Mini Note 2133 and MSI
Wind 100. Of course, there’s a lot of variety in the netbook market, with some
units featuring 8-inch or smaller screens, running PowerPC processors and other
differences that take them out of the realm of a typical netbook computer.
The best example of a business netbook is arguably the MSI
Wind U120. With a street price of around $350, the MSI
Wind is cheap enough to draw the attention of even the most performance-driven
users. Powered by a 1.6GHz Atom processor, the unit offers excellent
performance by netbook standards. The MSI
Wind also features a 160GB hard disk, 1GB of RAM,
an integrated Webcam, a 1,024-by-600-resolution 10-inch display, Bluetooth 2.0,
802.11b/g/n, three USB ports, a card reader
and Windows XP Home Edition. The unit sports battery life of about 4 hours and
weighs about 2.5 pounds.
While those specs sound impressive, the reality is the MSI
Wind is only useful for some very lightweight chores, such as Web browsing,
e-mail and some Web applications. The screen is too small and the resolution is
too low to make it an effective device for presentations, unless you lug along
a projector, and the general performance of the unit is not enough to
effectively run the most recent version of Microsoft Office or other business
software suites. Further holding back performance is the onboard graphics
subsystem, which uses an Intel GMA 950 with 64MB display memory.
Good enough for text and basic graphics, but not up to speed for advanced 3-D
graphics.
That assessment pretty much fits all of the available netbooks on the market.
Some may perform worse, but none performs much better than the MSI
Wind.
That makes the whole netbook segment somewhat questionable for business use,
although the units do have their niches. No one should expect to roll out
netbooks in an enterprise to meet the needs of a mobile work force.
