Ultralights, MacBook Air and Netbooks, Oh My - Ultralight Notebooks (
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Ultralight Notebooks
Today, notebooks come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from the 17-inch screen,
15-pound behemoth desktop replacement to the ultra-mini 8-inch screen, 1-pound
handheld. Somewhere in between is the ideal form factor for a mobile worker.
The only problem is, that form factor may not be the same from worker to
worker, so picking a notebook computer for the corporate work force is bound to
be an exercise in compromise.
Some would choose Toshiba’s Portege as a fine portable to carry around, but
those counting the bucks may choke on the $3,000 price tag. Some may go to the
other extreme and choose a consumer-grade notebook for under $1,000 and
sacrifice some business capabilities and a lot of portability.
Perhaps, the best way to go about selecting what would be the best compromise
is to put a dollar value on the unit, say around $1,400. That leads to a value
proposition that beats the MacBook Air, but to be fair, the system should have
a 13.3-inch or larger screen, weigh in at around 4 pounds, sport a dual-core
processor and include numerous ports, along with an internal optical drive.
Surprisingly, there are quite a few notebooks that fit, including the Lenovo
ThinkPad T400, Toshiba Satellite U305 and Tecra R10, Dell Vostro 1310, and Fujitsu
LifeBook S6520. Some may wonder why Hewlett-Packard didn’t make the cut here.
Simply put: HP’s thin and light systems come in at 5.1 pounds, a little heavy
for the market segment that we are shooting for.
While each of those systems has plenty of merit, the Fujitsu LifeBook S6520, the
latest model of the bunch to enter the market, offers a great deal of features
for the $1,429 sticker price.
The system offers a 14.1-inch display, a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor, a DVD
writer, 802.11a/b/g/n, a 120GB SATA hard drive, integrated Webcam, 1GB of DDR3
RAM, three bootable USB
2.0 ports, and audio and video out ports, and it weighs in at just 4 pounds.
The system comes with Windows Vista Business Edition preinstalled and offers a
downgrade to Windows XP Pro.
Simply put, the mobile worker can get all of the functionality needed to work
almost anywhere for about $1,400. Of course, the unit won’t perform like a
high-performance workstation, but it does offer plenty of performance to run
office suites, presentations, videoconferencing solutions and pretty much
anything else a user can throw at it.
The general idea here was to show three distinct paths to mobile productivity
and to point out the strengths and weaknesses of each path. Summing it up, the
only viable mobile PC solution comes down to the traditional notebook computer,
where there is plenty of variety and options to meet anyone’s needs or budget.
Netbooks are just simply too low end to take on the chores of the typical
mobile worker, but can be an inexpensive solution for those who only need to do
the minimum of Web-based work.
The MacBook Air proves to be too limited and too expensive to hand out in mass
to a mobile work force, and its shortcomings quickly rear their ugly heads once
someone tries to expand on the capabilities.
The lesson learned here is that this is not the time for solution providers
to abandon thin and light notebook computers for the latest fad PCs or trendy
devices.
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