Why the netbook?

You’ve probably heard about netbooks. Small, light computers with scaled-down components, all running on the Intel Atom chip, a revolutionary CPU introduced not so long ago. This tiny chip allowed manufacturers to cram more things onto a miniscule motherboard without overheating, which meant a radically smaller form factor and lead to an entirely new category of computers.

Of course, there’s a limit to how small these things can get, mainly due to the keyboards, which can’t get much smaller than 80% of a standard keyboard size without becoming painfully unusable. But their current size is incredible–about the same dimensions and weight as a hardcover book.

Reason for Celebration Number 1: The Damn Size.

If you’ve never used or carried one of these around before, let me explain why this is the biggest selling point: you can throw these things into a shoulder bag and still fit a dozen other things in there after. They can fit in your girlfriend’s purse. You can put them in the furthest corner of a suitcase and not worry about losing all the rest of your precious packing space.

This makes a massive difference in where you choose to take (and take out) your computer. I take subways throughout the day, and while before I would barely carry my 15″-screen Toshiba around with me, let alone pull the damn thing out on the subway, my new Acer Aspire One comes out repeatedly.

Reason for Celebration Number 2: Unbelievably Long Battery Life.

While there are dozens of netbooks out there, the one I finally went with and the one that’s currently tops in the marketplace is undoubtedly the newest Acer Aspire One, which comes with a 160gig HD, Windows XP, and a 6-cell battery, which gives you five hours of usage time (with wi-fi on). Five damn hours!

That’s the second-biggest selling point on these things. A device you can throw in your bag and take anywhere, combined with virtually no worries about the battery anymore. I can take a train from Rome to Milan without worrying about a charger, and work the entire time, which is something I never expected from a laptop.

Reason for Celebration Number 3: They Don’t Cost So Much.

Third point: the price. This thing cost me $420 canadian dollars, or at the current exchange rate, $332 american dollars, or 260 euros. Sure, the recession has assaulted all of us, kept us shivering in bed, holding our few remaining dollars close to our shrivelled, undernourished bodies, but we can probably part with a few hundred in exchange for something as fine as a netbook.

They’ve Got Some Unforseen Advantages.

Fine, we’ve got size, amazing battery life, and a digestible price. Before I go into a few of the disadvantages of having a netbook (as always, there are a few), let’s run over a few extra, unforseen advantages:

You can install OSX on this thing.

Yep, it’s possible. And it runs just fine. The installation isn’t painless–you’re probably going to have to pop a new, $15 wireless card into it, and mess around with the insanelymac forums for a few hours, but in the end you’ll have yourself a tiny computer that runs OSX. Since apple doesn’t seem likely to be offering a netbook anytime soon (maybe some kind of enclosure for the iPhone would be enough, frankly), this is your next-best solution.

It’s not perfect–the fan on mine runs constantly, and there are little problems that require lots of forum-searching. But hey, you’ve got a tiny netbook and you’re running an amazing OS on it without any visual hiccups at all. It’s a lot.

You can run heavier applications than expected.

Sure, the Atom is only 1.5Ghz and can’t really do everything, but I’m DJing off this thing with Native Instruments’ Traktor (the latest, greatest version), and thanks to a strange bug in my 2Ghz Toshiba, I’m actually getting better performance from this little netbook than from my normal machine. I’m also running Photoshop CS4 (both in OSX and XP without problems), and while it’s not the fastest Photoshop experience in the world, it’s definitely useable when you need to get something done.

Obviously anyone needing to do some serious graphics work isn’t going to be relying on a machine with an 8-inch screen in the first place, but with the VGA out cable, if you’ve got a nice big LCD handy, this Aspire One will give you a Mac desktop on the fly.

User communities are nice and big.

These things are selling like crazy, so both the Aspire One and MSI Wind communites online are huge, and constantly growing. Any modifications, hacks, or problems you might run into will immediately have some kind of corresponding forum post, or 50. No more desperately searching around to see if there’s someone with your obscure laptop model in the furthest corners of the internet.

And Yeah, There Are Some Disadvantages.

Ok: the screen gets annoying. It’s 8-inches and doesn’t always fit everything. Full-screen modes in browsers help, hiding the taskbar does too. Anything to increase your useable screen space. But it doesn’t change the fact that you’re dealing with something pretty tiny.

And the keyboard can be a hassle too. Mainly in the transition between it and larger ones. It’s no problem after about 15 minutes of usage, but if you’re working all day on a large keyboard and just want 15 minutes on your netbook during your train home, those 15 minutes will probably feature a whole lot of typos. By the time you’re ready to type normally, it’s time to close it down.

But don’t worry. These are small, small disadvantages, nothing compared to the sheer satisfaction of finally being able to carry around a pretty-much-fully-functional computer and not having to think about the weight. Hail thee, glorious netbook. Hail thee.