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11.6" Netbooks Face Off
Dr. Damage writes "Netbooks have grown from tiny curiosities with 7" screens into surprisingly well-rounded little computers. The latest step is 11.6" displays with 1366x768 resolution and near-full-sized keyboards. Two such systems are available now for under $400 at US retailers: the Aspire One at Walmart and the Gateway LT3103 at Best Buy. The Gateway packs an Athlon 64 processor and Radeon graphics. The Tech Report bought them both and has compared them head to head in some depth, choosing a clear winner between the two." Like most such in-depth reviews, this one is spread across 10 pages.
soon we'll be marvelling at the 15" netbooks with core 2 duos!!!
I can't wait!
then we'll see the introduction of some amazingly tiny 7" microbook!!
I can't wait!
Nice slashvertisement.
Not.
I have a 7 inch netbook in my pants...
(rounded up to compensate for low self-esteem)
The Gateway one "won" in the writer's estimate, due to a larger screen, faster CPU, better graphics.
In short, it's all of about an inch and a half smaller than his regular notebook, with a (probably, I didn't read all TMFA either) bigger HDD and more memory.
Sent from your iPad.
Stop drinking and posting.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Like most such in-depth reviews, this one is spread across 10 pages.
I highly suggest checking out the Firefox Autopager add on. It nicely formats this into a single page for easy reading. Although I do suggest turning off the "Show AutoPager Refinements" as it will give you suggestions on search pages that try to redirect you to some other search engine. Otherwise it is EXCELLENT and fixed a lot of my hatred of viewing this 10 page articles that should be on one page.
i guess it's the cheapskate route for people who really want a 13 inch macbook, but don't need bluetooth or wireless n.
i personally think it shouldn't be called a netbook if you really can't use it all day without carrying around a charger.
My 12.1" Samsung NC20 netbook with 1280x800 resolution does just fine thank you
The 11.6" are an odd variety... of what I have seen so far. In the spring, they upgraded the 10" ones I was looking at from the N270 Atoms to the N280, which could handle HD video but the screens were usually at 1024x600. Just barely big enough for comfortable browsing. Now the Acer Aspire and a few others that I have seen have that 11.6" wide screen that have a really nice ~1300x768 resolution, but the chip is now a Z520, which reportedly stutters when handling HD video.
Now that Always Innovating's arm-based Tablet/Netbook is out, I'm almost tempted by that instead:
http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/home/index.htm
But the resoluion is still the dreary 1024x600, although being able to take off the body/keyboard completely is the first well done tablet form factor I have seen.
Not far off are Arm's multiple core chips and I assume intel has something like that for atom in the works. Ah, the old upgrade-treadmill is really hitting netbooks bigtime, haven't really had this problem in desktops the last five years.
There is also the Lenovo IdeaPad S12 Netbook
The Internet Book Database
Is my 12" Powerbook with 5-hour battery life now retroactively a netbook?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
what defines a netbook?
To me it seems to orginated as meaning "subnotebook", small, versitile, light.
I love the "near full size keyboard"
Fine I will pit an 11.5 netbook vs my 12 laptop.
...is that some sites like Yahoo Mail still "delay" one's surfing experience with a warning of how your display settings might not work well with the site. Folks at Yahoo in particular, do not realize that netbooks with lower resolutions are in existence. By the way, if you choose to ignore the warning, the site displays normally.
I think they (Yahoo), are just lacking the normal expected degree of ability. What do you think?
For all it's worth, I own one, and I find it fantastic. The resolution is finally high enough to actually use it (I couldn't stomach a 1024x600 screen), and it's VERY thin and light. What did it for me, is the ease with which this netbook can be upgraded. Both the hard drive and memory are easily user-serviceable. Actually, I purchased a 2gb memory kit along with the notebook, and I don't even think I booted it with the 1GB it comes with. I got the WinXP version sans bluetooth from newegg for $380... a little over $400 w. the memory upgrade. The computer also has an internal minPCI slot and a SIM-card reader, which makes it theoretically possible to install an internal 3G card for ultimate portability of communications. The battery lasts about 6.5-7 hours with Wifi usage and brightness set to about 75%. Overally, some of the best $400 I've spent in the digital world.
The glossy shell does attract fingerprints, but I don't really care too much (I lost that compulsion a little while after I got my iPhone). When it really bothers me, I take a damp microfiber cloth to it and the fingerprints come off... really same idea as my car.
As an aside, to be honest I am not a big fan of WinXP these days. I've become spoiled with WinVista64SP1 on my gaming desktop, and Ubuntu on my work laptop.
A device with a 9" screen and 8+ hours of battery life is a netbook. A device with a 12" screen and just 5 hours of battery life is a sub-notebook.
Isn't the point of the netbooks how small and convenient they are.
I think we need clearly defined sizes for terms or else we'll end up with 15 inch netbooks by the end of next year.
I propose:
I'd still like to get a somewhat bigger Linux netbook. I have some EeePC 2G Surf units, and like them, but the original version with the tiny screen just isn't quite enough. Has Microsoft totally crushed the Linux netbook market, or is something cheap still available with no Windows?
What I would like to know is which netbook is John Travolta and which is Nicholas Cage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
I have an original eee 701 and I am very happy with it. It is about right size, has large enough keyboard to type short notes and so on. The only complaint really is that it is a bit on the thick side and the use time is slightly too short. I really like the use of a solid state disk and lack of windows too, not to mention the 199 euros I paid for it as new.
I am hoping that once the current crazyness of calling ever larger things netbooks is finally over someone will make something revolutionary.. whatever they call it then... something the size of eee PC, though hopefully by then they can make it thinner. I will likely personally need such in about 4-5 years or so.. hope they have again such on the market at that point instead of the current "netbooks"
One time a scientist friend of mine talked about a pet peeve of his regarding some academic papers: when the Abstract section reads like an advertisement for the paper, rather than a summary.
I wish kdawson had the same sensibilities.
Since both have an ATI graphics chip the choice is easy, neither.
The Aspire One has an Intel graphics chipset. If you'd really rather run that instead of an ATI chipset, be my guest...
Bow-ties are cool.
The new oshiba for $400 beats both of those in preformance and quality.
"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." -Dr. Seuss
But it has a "mainframe" price :-(
The Air is light, very readable screen, fast graphics, etc.
Like most such in-depth reviews, this one is spread across 10 pages.
Not with the AutoPager extension installed it doesn't.
Actually, the Acer at least is less powerful than most netbooks on the market, it uses an Atom Z520 targeted at 'UMPC' type devices. It has lower clock and FSB speeds than the N270/N280 used in almost every other netbook on the market.
Thats why I didn't buy one for $330 at Costco yesterday.
12" Apple Netbook with 5-hour battery life! New product. Lightly used!
Then, watch as the fanboys bid it up to over grand.
Go ahead! Do it and buy that Macbook Pro you've always wanted.
I read the whole article; I thought it was worth my time. But I'll summarize the most important points for you.
He liked the Gateway better. The Athlon64 uses more power and radiates more heat compared to the Atom in the Acer; but it delivers more performance, and the author thinks it's worth it. If you want maximum run time and don't care so much about performance, the Acer would be better for you. (The Atom does hyperthreading, and some video codecs are tuned to take advantage of that, so the Acer did slightly better than expected on some video playback; but even so, he felt the Athlon64 was better overall for video playback.)
Both netbooks come pre-loaded with Vista and piles of bloatware. He scrubbed off the bloatware and updated Vista to the latest service pack, and the machines were a bit faster. He then installed Windows 7 and they were a bit faster again, but not amazingly so. He didn't say anything about Linux, but I'll wager that if he put Ubuntu 9.04 on the netbooks, they would fly.
By the way, I'm running Ubuntu on a six-month-old 10.6" Acer Aspire One, with an Atom chip, and the performance is great. My biggest complaint is that there are dialog boxes that are just too big for the vertical resolution (600 pixels); the reviewed netbooks both have 1366x768 resolution, so the dialog boxes that annoy me would not be a problem. (I'm talking about the setup dialogs for Evolution. To set up Evolution, I had to judiciously use the Tab key to move the highlight to the "Okay" button, which was not visible because the dialogs were too tall; it worked but it was a huge pain, and not everyone would know you can even do that.) I've been meaning to try the special Netbook Remix version of Ubuntu... but with these new 11" netbooks, there would be no reason to bother; just run Ubuntu 9.04.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I owned a Fujitsu notebook PC with a 10.4" screen around ten years ago; most active matrix screens were that size at the time. So we're just reverting to an older format with these new netbooks. I'd have to agree with the thread originator; we need both bigger, more powerful and more gorgeous notebooks, and smaller, more portable netbooks. The in-between size is a trade-off that benefits very few.
Any machine with an Intel GMA500 is pure garbage. ..but both of them come with Windows and there don't seem to be any Ubuntu options, so I view this more as two clear losers rather than one clear winner. I know, I know. We're outnumbered.
This past weekend, the wife picked up an Acer Aspire One (AO751h) @ Costco for about $330. Came w/ 1GB RAM, 160GB HDD, 11.6" screen, WinXP Home w/ SP3, Atheros 802.11b/g. My impression of it, up until last night when we finally booted it w/ a USB-stick live linux distro was, in a nutshell, "worthless piece of crap that can't stay running more than a few hours".
I mean, quite literally, every few minutes, to every few hours, this new from box thing would just randomly lock hard, no keyboard, touchpad, or even power button response. Unpingable. Needed a battery pull to recover. This is with the from-factory supplied OS (WinXP Home 32-bit, w/ SP3, remember). Even sitting idle, it would do this. With or without any USB devices plugged in. Connected or disconnected from the network. With or without AV software running. With the original or updated BIOS or drivers (newest from Acer's site).
As of last night, booting off a USB-based Debian Lenny, trying to exercise as much of the machine as possible, from memtest86+ to md5summing the entire 160G drive, to just sitting idle all night long, it's _still_ running, as of about an hour ago with no lockups. Go figure. Alas, lenny's too old to have decent ath5k support (not sure that'll even really work), so I wasn't able to connect to our WPA2-protected wireless network, to see if that caused issues.
The only other caveat I've found so far, is that it uses the Intel GMA 500 graphics chipset which...isn't very well supported at all (the only Intel GMA one that isn't). Vesa resolutions are OK, but not 1366x768 native (IIRC, it's coming up 1024x768). A little too blurry/not crisp for me, but the wife seems happy enough, coming from a Thinkpad T30 that looks downright dull in comparison.
I'm not sure I'd get one for myself.
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
I have a similar problem - a Mac Mini (the original PPC version) hooked to my HD television. It looks beautiful at something like 2200x1400 resolution, but video stutters, even normal AVIs. I lowered the resolution to ~1900x1200 and it plays video, even HD video just fine. Maybe you can buy the aspire with 1300x768 screen and simply lower the resolution when you want to view HD video.
Is it just me, or is the windows 7 taskbar much taller (ie consumes more vertical space) than previous versions?
That, combined with thicker titlebars, doesn't make for very efficient use of vertical space on widescreen displays and especially on small netbook displays...
The Ubuntu netbook interface seems far more suited to such devices, it has no bar at the bottom, and the menu bar at the top combines with the titlebar of any open window to use very little of the very limited vertical space on the screen.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
No shit an Athlon 64 and Radeon GPU is going to eat the Acer like a too small bag of doritos - because its apples to oranges here.
My first laptop was a Compaq 15" w/Athlon64 3200+ and Radeon 200M. It also weighed about 8lbs (a lot with or without textbooks in college) and sure, I could run Half Life 2 on it - but it sucked the battery out in 2 hours normal use, maybe 1/2 hour on HL2. Which is why I looked at my priorities, and how since it was for school and browsing the web when visiting family, I replaced it with a 12" Gateway Core Solo ULV and Intel GPU - much lighter and longer battery life of up to 4 or 5 hours.
My point is, too many people don't see that the reason for netbooks in the first place is to have a light weight laptop with decent battery life that costs under $1200 USD. Don't give me that "Oh, but they want it because it's cheap!" crap, because they could just as well go get a $400 luggable desktop replacement like the one I had. If they want a cheap fast computer, they could have my old laptop (if it still worked). If they want something cheap, light weight, and long battery life, they just might have to put up with it being a tad slow.
Now, if they **really** want something light weight, mediocre to long battery life, and whatever the current generation of desktop processor is, they will *definitely* pay out the ass for it. That held true for spec to price ratio when I bought my 12" Gateway 2 years ago, it holds true now, and it will more than likely continue to be true another 2 years from now...
What I'm waiting for (and maybe I'll get it when Windows 7 comes out) is a netbook with an Atom 300 series, or any dual-core chip for that matter. It's not like I want to play Crysis on one, but a little more omf would be really nice. As of right now, they all seem to have more or less the same CPU, whether it's a N270 or N280 or Z something, they are all about the same.
It's probably a chipset issue but i'd rather get something with n rather than g for future proofing, in this case screen size alone is a step backwards.
Netbook size and battery life but released in 2000. It could use more modern ports and a better processor (240 has a PII-class mobile Celeron) and more room for RAM, but it's serviceable. The keyboard is a nice clicky old-school Thinkpad keyboard. And it has a trackpoint, glory be!
Srsly, Lenovo needs to look at this old-school model for some inspiration.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
It has a PowerVR graphics chipset that Intel stuck their label on, not an Intel graphics chipset. No open drivers for that.
Could we please stop using the phrases "Face Off" and "Shootout" to spark interest for a simple product comparison. It seems so "SUNDAY! SUNDAY!! SUNDAY!!!"
The game.
Throw in trackpoint and I'd buy one.
The original keyboard clit. It's what your finger was made to play with...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I think the biggest problem with this comparison is the brands. I didn't even have to read the article to know that they're both pieces of shit, just from the brand names.
Since both have an ATI graphics chip the choice is easy, neither.
The Aspire One has an Intel graphics chipset. If you'd really rather run that instead of an ATI chipset, be my guest...
Since the ATI chipset here was classified by AMD as legacy and stopped support as of Catalyst 9.3 I'd rather have the Intel, seeing the 9.3 drivers don't support the latest versions of xorg. Have fun running the shitty OS ATI drivers that don't work worth a damn, at least the Intel you can have desktop effects and 3D support. AMD won't even be making Win7 drivers for the ATI either so you are SOL on that one too.
...is that some sites like Yahoo Mail still "delay" one's surfing experience with a warning of how your display settings might not work well with the site.
They should get some of those 256-colour animated icons from 10 or 11 years ago that said "best viewed at 1024 x 768 with Internet Explorer 4" or somesuch shit. (Yeah, because I'm really going to change my sodding browser and/or screen resolution just to view your badly-designed site. Twonks...).
And then they could put the left-hand vertical menu in a frame for that added 90s feel. Then host the whole damn thing on a Geocities site- they own(ed) that, after all.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Most window managers will let you move a window around if you press Alt and then click anywhere in the window.
Sure, I tried that. And the window hit the top of the Ubuntu desktop, and would not go up any further, so it did not help. If the top of the window could have gone out of the visible area, allowing me to see the "Okay" button, that would have been nice. Also nice would be if a scroll bar appeared to one side of the dialog and just let me scroll the dialog until the "Okay" button was visible.
I thought about trying to set up a virtual desktop size larger than the actual, but in the end I just hit the Tab key a few times and got on with life. Evolution is perfectly fine to use in 1024x600 resolution, just a pain when setting it up.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Sounds like a laptop to me.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
My grandmother has been looking for a cheap notebook with a full size display and keyboard that she can use while sitting in her easy chair. I think she needs an integrated or cheap TV tuner, too, for better viewing and listening.
I was going to recommend a Netbook, but the displays is are too tiny for her.
Any ideas?
If it's CPU and RAM capacity weren't too small for today's software (and operating systems!), I'd still vote the Thinkpad 240 10.4" screen laptops as the best formfactor notebook ever.
Are they hosting this on a netbook? Anybody got a mirror? It is number 3 on the main page now. The /. "effect" should really stop affecting it. Don't you people want to know what your spleen does?
Older Macbook Air systems can be bought as refurb from Apple for around $1k. That's just three of these "netbooks" and I'll bet it would last three times longer...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If it's got an Athlon 64 processor in it, is it still a netbook? Doesn't seem to me like it would be anymore!
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Okay, so what I've been able to gather, netbooks are either small machines that aren't very powerful, but make up for it with portability and runtime, or normal sized laptops that are super super cheap and have no other advantages over a regular laptop.
If the latter is the case, why not just call them 'cheap laptops'?
I don't have a netbook, but I understand why you'd want a 7" screen in a super-portable format. As a former sysadmin, that sort of tool would be invaluable. Once you start getting up to 11.6", the utility seems to fall through the floor.
Am I missing the point somewhere?
I have an Aspire 1. I'm not sure I'd like it except for these things:
1. I installed Linux on it (Arch, to be precise)
2. I run fvwm, though I'd also be happy with xfce if I liked it as much
3. I installed the Vimperator Firefox plugin
Windows is just too much for it to be responsive. KDE is also too much. (I thought KDE felt more responsive than Windows, but I'm willing to admit that's just because of my massive dislike for the latter.) fvwm is snappy-fast and loads quick. xfce would be similar, I think.
Vimperator is excellent, expecially if you can type. Not only does it free you from using the touchpad mouse, it also frees up all that real-estate that is normally taken up with buttons and URL fields.
3 USB ports means you can easily plug in an external keyboard, mouse, and something else. I use the thing for presentations with the external VGA port--very conveniently portable. And the 6+ hour battery rules. I leave the thing suspended for days at a time--a week ago I couldn't even remember when I'd charged it and was sure the battery would be dead, but it was 54% when I reanimated it..
It even has enough 3D power to run simple games. (Only about 5 FPS with Flightgear, though!)
I use it for dev and writing. I don't miss my old laptop one bit.
AutoPager
Martin Ankerl made a theme for Gnome that fixes many of those types of issues:
http://martin.ankerl.com/2008/05/13/human-compact-gnome-theme/
--bornagainpenguin
Have a Virgin Mobile USA smartphone? Give VMRoms.com a try!
It all depends on which one runs Linux better. That will be the clear winner for me.
Every day I see people who bought very expensive notebooks that can only run Windows Vista (or 7). I certainly see no reason to buy a piece of equipment that dictates what I can run on it.
I had many bad experiences with ATI chipsets and nothing but joy (despite merely bearable performance) from Intel ones. As I don't play games, the choice, for me, is obvious.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Or, to put it another way: "Under withering attack from intel and microsoft, netbooks have cease to be an elegant and focused attempt to short-circuit the bloat parade and rethink how we use computers, and become just another overpriced and anemic laptop running microsoft's mess of an operating system."
We live, as we dream -- alone....
I put mine on the side, makes the most sense, especially with these vertically-starved-display netbooks.
It's also easier on the eyes to scan down a column than across a row (assuming you have it in the old taskbar buttons method not the new weird grouping thing).
Your situation obviously isn't the norm because plenty of people are running netbooks just fine. You should return it, there must be a defect. Just because it's small doesn't mean it's going to throw up errors.
What exactly were you hoping to add to the discussion? That "it was useless till we put linux on it"? Meh, heard that one before...
1. Claim to be a fair-minded person who occasionally uses Linux.
2. Slashvertize for a product that comes with Windows software.
3. Demonize an earlier version of Windows software. (That shiny XP needs be tossed in the trash once Microsoft has new crack to sell).
4. Recommend usage of the new Microsoft crack.
They all add up to shill-vertizing. Can't you Microsoft goons be a little less obvious in how you post? Given how poorly you hide your tracks I'm guessing they must not pay you enough and only hire community college kids who can't otherwise find jobs in this economy.
I do sympathize for you - hey at least you're one step up from a telemarketing job, no?