Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal has taken a look at several Netbooks and has posted a summary video as follows:
Walt pushes his review from the perspective that Netbooks are some sort of halfway house between Smartphones and standard Laptops. This may have once been the case when dealing with the little 7” EeePC 701 and it seems that much of his perspective comes from the review of that little device back in January 2008. I purchased the EeePC 701 and used it as a web/email device and did find the small screen, lack of storage and slightly limited performance a problem but the 2nd generation EeePC 90x, Acer and MSI Wind products have resolved those issues.
Earlier in the year, I moved over my primary laptop to being the Advent 4211, an OEM branded MSI Wind U100. This has sufficient performance (Intel Atom 1.6GHz), storage (80GB HD) and screen size (10” 1024×600) for my needs, which are largely email (Outlook), Office applications, Project planning, Blogging, IPTV Video playback and messaging – all in fact except playing games. The only issue that arose was one of battery life where for cost and supply reasons, the battery was limited to being a 2200mAh one which provided a little over 2 hours of use. This however was solved by adding the 4400mAh 6 cell battery which cost less than £50, although I would have much preferred it to have been included from the start. This provides over 4 hours of use and is certainly the most long running laptop that I have ever owned.
This is all in addition to having a Windows Mobile 6.0 Smartphone which allows on the go email (I use the HTC S710 Vox) but in no way replaces having a full PC. Even if I had the famed Apple iPhone, I would not see that replacing the Netbook as my workhorse device as it simply does not have the power, keyboard, and application capability of a full OS based device. All the same, interesting view and I look forward to the 3rd Generation Netbooks that are now becoming available that make use of onboard 3/3.5G communication devices.