I was an instant convert to the netbook concept – the low cost, ultra light and small laptop with good battery life and excellent connectivity, at least when combined with 3G cards. I still am, and I keep my Asus 1008HA charged up and available whenever I am travelling and suspect I need a PC but not needing to carry anything larger. In fact, I used it for a very long time as my primary machine – and very capable it was once I upgraded it to 2GB memory. Over all this time, if I had to pick out its most important performance feature I would have to pick out its battery life.
I come from the depths of time when battery life was measured in less than 3 hours, but the Asus provided me with between 4 and 6 hours of good PC time depending upon whether I was Internet connected or not. This gave me the taster however, and I have just moved across to a slightly larger but still very compact and light machine, the Asus UL30. The key factor in this move? its battery life, the headline value of 12 hours of use.
In reality, it has given me 8 to 10 hours depending upon Internet usage but this has meant I have the ‘all (business) day battery life’. I have proved it in the last couple of weeks with an all day trip by train to Cologne and back, and several days of all day meetings where the power sockets were in very short supply. I survived without a single sweat.
This makes battery life the most important or key performance factor for me, and I suspect that this is the case for many other mobile workers. Which is why the industry is pushing more and more products out with longer and longer lasting batteries, notable of which is the latest netbook products from Asus:
ASUS makes EeePC 1015P and 1015PE official, endows them with 13.5 hours of battery life — Engadget.
Of course, this has to be hand in hand with good keyboards, screens and processor capability and I believe firmly that all netbooks with 2GB are plenty fast enough for office and information worker tasks, although going with multi-core and even the higher performance CULV processors gives a welcome boost without impacting the battery life.
What do you think? Is battery life primary? or is it performance? or light weight? and are netbooks the ultimate for all three?