Netbook choices… what a difference a year makes.
Jump back in time with me a year. For sake of argument, it’s now July 18th, 2007; one year ago. The first thing I’m going to do is search Google for tomorrow’s winning lottery numbers and buy a ticket. More importantly, the second thing I’m going to do is scour the web for the best deal on an inexpensive but decent performing small notebook that weights two pounds or so. Hmm…. nothing’s coming up for under a grand or two… better hope I didn’t play the wrong numbers on that lottery ticket.
OK, let’s beam back to the future, or more appropriately, the present. I see that the new $379 Acer Aspire One is available and earned a decent 3.5 out of 5 stars from LAPTOP Magazine. We’ve already seen the first generation of the Asus Eee PC 700-series come and go… you can’t count the different Eee models on one hand any more thanks to the 90x and 1000. HP’s Mini-Note comes in no less than four flavors while MSI is blowing in the Wind with both an 8- and 10-inch model. And don’t forget we should see the Dell entry here as well at some point next month.
This is actually amazing to me. In October, I pretty much had once choice for this market and I took it with the purchase of my Eee PC 701. I’m glad I did because it opened up my eyes to new computing models. I’m also considering a new netbook purchase but I’m actually at a cross-roads due to all of the choices. Sure, many of the choices are similar to each other, which is why the big differentiator here is value. I used to think it was price, but with the many similarities, I’m leaning more towards "price and functions", hence: value. At this point, I think I’m going to wait and see what Dell unravels, but I’m still amazed at how quickly we went from no market to a product-saturated market!
Shipping just dropped off my Wind. The shipping box was quite small. The MSI box inside of that was even smaller, but I didn’t know what to say when I opened that one only to see yet another smaller box. It’s kind of funny I knew what to expect, but I was still surprised when I first held it in my hand.
Any bets on how long I will let it charge before I take it for a spin?
I agree that the rate of development is astonishing; it’s only been nine months since the Eee 701 was introduced. There seems to be a bit of irrational exuberance on the part of PC makers chasing low margin sales. Perhaps netbooks are viewed as an entry strategy in developing markets because I don’t expect this to be more than a niche in mature markets.
Both value and price will be important factors driving netbook sales. The “value window” is fairly small for netbooks because they start to compete with better-equipped full-size notebooks once the price gets above $500. While the small form factor has value, most target consumers will be attracted to these products by price. So functionality and feature set will help differentiate among products with a low price.
From a value perspective, netbooks also compete against older-model full-feature mini-notebooks. Sony, Fujitsu, and other manufacturers have offered 9″ and 10″ computers for several years. Although discontinued, these older-model notebooks offer similar or better performance for about the same price as the high-end netbooks.
I’m curious to see the new Dell and Fujitsu netbooks and look forward to the HP 2133 with a new CPU. In general, though, most of the new products are “me too” (or, more appropriately, “Eee too”) offerings that will face significant challenges in a highly competitive market.
Hi Kevin,
Agree with you – it’s value that counts with so many choices. In the end I went with a rebadged MSI Wind. Checkout my review if you’re interested.
http://www.last100.com/2008/07/14/ive-jumped-on-the-netbook-bandwagon-msi-wind-advent-4211-review/
- Steve, editor last100.com
Yup.
I’m in a bit of a quandry right now. While I love the size and form factor of the new Kohjinsha SC3, do I *REALLY* want to drop US$1,200 on a toy? I would feel better about it if not for the heat issue.
The MSI Wind and Acer Aspire at less than half the cost seem to fit the bill. Unfortunately no one has the Wind in stock, and the XP/hard drive version of the Aspire is effectively vaporware right now.
I have a conference in mid-August to attend that I was hoping to have subnotebook in place for, but I’m having doubts.
on the topic of the SC3, the gigabyte M912 seems to be up there along side it.
I just got my black MSI Wind yesterday. So far so good. I also own an Eee PC 901 (XP), HP Mini-Note, MacBook Air and Sony TZ150. The Wind and the Sony are very similar in size and look. I’ll have to spend more time with the Wind for a full review.
The one I am waiting for is the Pandora (openpandora.org) It is marketed as an open source portable gaming platform but spec wise it is a full featured arm-based laptop (qwerty, touchscreen, wifi, bt, dual sdhc slots, analog sticks) in a size, slightly larger than a Nintendo DS, which in my opinion makes it a first decent truly pocketable UMPC at a reasonable price (they are planning prices around 320 USD)
The Pandora looks nice (and it’s on my shopping list as well).
However, it’s a completely different device than a netbook. If you’re going to be comparing it to anything, a Nokia tablet would be the closest thing.
I bought the HP 2133 pretty much when it came out, and have not regretted being somewhat of an early adopter. Sure, it’s not a race horse. Sure, it would be nice to actually be able to buy accessories for it, such as a spare 3-cell battery. But the keyboard and screen are very nice for this overall form factor, and with more and more of my work being cloud based, I find that I leave my “heavy” Thinkpad X60t behind more and more often.
i’m not impressed so far, because all i’ve seen are a bunch of announcements. the few that have trickled to market are incredibly difficult to actually get your hands on. theres only a couple (like H) that are readily available.
Battery life, battery life, battery life…I can’t reiterate it enough
For my purposes at least, I have to know my UMPC/laptop/PDA won’t die after a few hours of work at a cafe. In Toronto there are still plenty of cafes that either don’t have accessible power outlets, or only have one or two that get hogged.
Dynamism has a few Panasonic models that last up to 8-14 hours and are 3lbs or so. I know those are $1500+, but it shows that the concept is possible at least.
Hmmm, I recently made the big choice to upgrade my eee 701 also. I choose the 901, so far I’m loving it. Multi-touch is actually very useful when you try it and I can’t believe the large battery they gave. The only gripes I have are that the keyboard isnt really changed, but it does feel slightly better, and the split SSD deal was pretty disappointing, but I plan to do that jkkmobile did and ZIF HDD it up.