The screen is very easy to read with good, bright contrast. But dot-pitch, the distance between dots - a specification not generally cited for laptop Apple PowerBook G4 battery monitors - looks to be fairly high, giving an appearance of coarse grain. This won’t be an issue for most work-related applications, but it does mean it’s not the most pleasing screen for watching DVD movies or working with photography.
Toshiba(Toshiba PA3399U-1BRS battery) is touting the Mini NB205 netbook, which comes in two different models. The differences are mostly cosmetic, though the more expensive model uses the slightly faster N280 processor, which clocks in at 1.66GHz. They retail at $399 and $349 respectively.
While I did not yet have the opportunity to use an actual netbook, I did own an ultraportable laptop for a year just before netbooks caught on. With a weight of just 2.6 pounds, an 11-inch display, and a puny 1.02 GHz processor, my ultraportable could almost have passed off as a netbook.
The N120’s battery life is another big draw. In PCW video-playback tests, the N120’s battery lasted an impressive 7 hours, 43 minutes. I managed to go for over 5 hours typing on the N120 at a recent Twitter conference, with Wi-Fi on and the screen’s brightness cranked all the way up. Even better, the six-cell standard Sony VGP-BPS2 battery protrudes only slightly, compared to the bulky six-cell battery options you’d get on the HP Mini 2140 and some other netbooks.
Dell(Dell Latitude D620 battery) Video Chat video-conferencing software comes preinstalled, for use with the microphone and optional integrated Webcam. There’s support for 802.11 draft-n wireless LAN or Mobile Broadband. And — now like the other Vostro laptops, which received a freshening up — there are security options such as a fingerprint reader, multifactor authentication and an encrypted hard drive with Wave Systems encryption software.
I’ve been so busy with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 news that I haven’t had time to comment on the latest hardware thing: netbooks. But, I was looking for a cheap little computer to hook up to the TV to look up the weather (tides, sunrise/sunset times), recipes, etc. In my search, I soon realized that a netbook might do the trick while simultaneously letting me “live” with a netbook, so I picked up a Lenovo(Lenovo C200 Battery for 42T5212) S10. So, are netbooks valuable? The answer, of course, depends on who you ask, but here are my thoughts after having worked with the S10 and some friends’ netbooks.