Death of Netbooks

A little over 4 years ago I bought an Asus PC701 4G Netbook. It was small, light, and did the job… well mostly. I struggled with the inability to have Outlook on a Linux based PC and I really needed Outlook. I upgraded to Windows XP and it all worked out well enough. At least for a secondary machine that is. In the end, that little SSD died and I upgraded to my next netbook – one that I actually used as my main machine for quite some time, a rebadged MSI Wind U100. This one was more sprightly running as it did an Atom processor with an (upgraded) 2GB of RAM, and an (upgraded) 160GB HDD. I could do everything on that little machine, even running Windows 7 Premium Home as soon as that came out. It is still a fine machine, if a little sluggish at times but with excellent battery life running above a real 4 hours.

Since then I have moved away from those little netbooks to my current Ultralight machines (a 13″ Asus UL30 and an 11.6″ HP DM1), but those machines owe quite a bit to those early netbooks, which in my view leads very much into today’s Ultrabooks. Netbooks identified the following very important requirements for a laptop – it had to have good to excellent battery life, be very light, have enough storage and sufficient performance. Those little Atom based machines have sufficient performance for browsing, a little wordprocessing, email and playing music – exactly what the average family need in laptops that are owned by every member of the family, and in fact what most busy business travellers also needed. All of these features have made their way into pretty much every single 11.6″ and 13″ based laptop today. Netbooks also helped greatly in the removal of the need to have an optical drive, so much so that very few actual machines these days have built in optical storage and most people don’t miss that except about twice a year, when a separate drive can be used.

Unfortunately things have moved on in the processor stakes, the memory stakes and the required workload stakes. Netbooks as they are today have not moved on except in the growth of the 11.6″ based ultra light laptop which also corrects the other main problem of netbooks – the manufacturers margins. The new “netbook” is the 11.6″ ultralight running Windows 7 Premium Home with 4GB of RAM, 320GB of HDD, a 1366×768 screen, and most importantly a dual core processor that is also ultra low power to give 5 to 6 hours of battery life for normal use.

So I do agree Netbooks have died but they begat some very interesting children. Without Netbooks we would all still be paying £600/$750 for a 14″ monster with 2 hours of battery life. Be thankful for Netbooks.

Netbooks sales drop 40%

Now would that be because everyone who wants one, has one? After all, there has been little apparent change in specification for three years… come on someone, add some extra functionality and power into the price bracket and people might upgrade.

Microsoft says there’s been an 8% decline in the consumer PC market and a whopping 40% decline in netbooks.

via Microsoft: Netbooks are down 40%.

Something in the Air

As a mobile worker, I slathered over the original Macbook Air however it simply was not attractive enough considering the recent launch of Netbooks from Asus and Acer. I found netbooks to be so much more cost effective without losing any of the functionality I needed. The fact that I am a confirmed PC user also helped. Since then I have gone from the original EeePC900 through the MSI Wind, on to the absolute lovely (and very Air ‘like) EeePC 1008 and now running with a workhorse Asus UL30A.

Now with the new Macbook Air 11.6” and 13.3” models, Apple has reignited my desire. Well initially it did, but since then I have had a more considered set of thoughts (maybe it had something to do with the fact that I was enjoying a couple of jars in my roaming local whilst reading the tweets and web from the ‘Back to the Mac’ event).

Firstly the use of Flash SSD for mass storage is something that I can get excited about but its utility is extremely limited as I do not suffer from disk failures (in fact my most recent disk failure was an SSD on the original EeePC701) and find that having more storage that is slower is better than having less storage that is quicker. I struggle now whenever I have less than 250GB mainly due to the utility of having all my files with me and ubiquitous file sync.

Secondly the battery life, something that is one of the most important (if not THE most important) capabilities of a laptop. The new Air’s have battery lives of 5 hours and 7 hours respectively, something that is quite respectable and I understand that Apple normally hits the nail on the head with their lifetimes. These may seem good and they are compared to my old Asus 1008 which could get 4 hours, but not when it is compared to my Asus UL30 – a machine that I get a real 10 hours out of. The new Airs will not get me through a working day without a charge, my Asus will.

Thirdly and finally, size/weight… once you get below a certain size and weight I believe there is a law of diminishing returns, and the extra thin and light Macbook Airs do not offer much advantage over my existing crop of machines. It is enough to be light and small, they do not have to be wafer thin and ultra-light.

The final point I have is also an important one… Apple have priced these machines well … for Apple Macs. However, I still bought both my Asus machines for the price of just one Air (the lowest cost one at that). I have the best of both worlds – the ultra light Asus Seashell 1008 (with 2GB of RAM) and the fuller body Asus UL30 (with 4GB RAM) without any premium being paid (and with both of them running Windows 7 Home Premium at that). I also do not have to pay £21 for proprietary DisplayPort to VGA adapter, or however much it is for an Ethernet adapter… these come built-in to my little machines Smile

I can suggest that you also look at alternatives, and Crunchgear have some for you to look through… there is even a higher spec variant of my Asus UL30 in the list!

Flying Complaints

One thing I have noticed moving to a larger (but still lightweight 13inch) laptop is that my ability to use it has been seriously curtailed on trains and more specifically aircraft. Essentially I cannot open the screen up more than purely vertical which makes it impossible to see what is on screen. Certainly not a comfortable position to do any work in.

This is an area that I have heard people are starting to use the iPad for, but I have an alternative answer (driven because I like physical keyboards) – this is where I dig out an old netbook (an EeePC 900) for ‘in flight’ use, because its small and dinky little 9 inch screen works in the confined space of the basic Economy seat. The lightness and size of the old netbook is also very helpful because now I have to carry two machines, but luckily my workflow using Dropbox and Live Mesh makes this a breeze to ensure I have my data everywhere I need it. Dropbox is a necessity because that old EeePC is running Ubuntu Netbook edition – a very capable little OS that has everything for text and info generation, and the ability to read tech docs. It will take a cold day in hell for Microsoft to provide a fully functioning Live Mesh implementation on Linux… after all they are ceasing to do so on Windows XP now!

The good thing is that the combined weight of the EeePC and the UL30 is still less than the laptops I ran around with just three years ago! The bad thing is that I have to dig two machines out of my bag to go through airport security.

Netbooks for the enterprise

There is now a steady flow of netbook class devices coming through from many suppliers (HP, Toshiba, Samsung et al), with the new HP Mini 1000 being HP’s second generation device correcting the major problems with their first generation (using the C7 processor rather than the Intel Atom, using XP instead of Vista Basic). Notebook.com (via Digital Home Thoughts) have a review of this latest unit, and a fair review it is although it makes what seems to be a throwaway comment about netbooks not being ready for business use. This is something I cannot agree with.

The main driver of this seems to be a belief about build quality being poor or ‘soft’ compared to the business market’s requirements. Now I have been using laptops since before they were even that (having made use of the Toshiba and Compaq machines since before they were even called laptops, and were called transportables), and have come across all manner of machines, but I have not noticed anything deficient in the build quality/robustness of the netbooks I have used (admittedly Asus and MSI only), and would certainly not warn the business user off of these devices. In many respects they are the ideal business machines as they focus on basic functionality, portability and not high performance games and video handling. This is pretty much what all businesses want of laptops. In fact, the performance capability that modern netbooks offers generally exceeds the capabilities of most standard build laptops in mainstream business, simply because these machines are specifications that have lasted three years or more for standardisation purposes, which generally means circa 2002-2004 hardware builds. Certainly it is also true that machines since 2004 have also only grown in capability via more RAM and Hard Disk space. Netbooks also offer business features without the gloss of high speed graphics that can be used for fanciful needs, combined with a level of standardisation we have not seen in a long while (most netbooks are the same processor, RAM, motherboard and graphics chipset configuration as each other now the C7s and so on are dropping out), and also making use of the OS of choice for the modern business – Windows XP (although upgrades to XP Professional may be needed for the more corporate business user).

On top of this netbooks offer another advantage – the basic hardware is extremely low cost. Not much of an advantage when the support costs of a user can be upwards of €600 per year, but a slight advantage in these challenging times is important.

So, when are we going to see a mass adoption by a major company of a Corporate Netbook? Or is this something that Microsoft wants to fight against, simply because that would mean underlining the Vista Failure? Certainly the software licensing agreements for ‘netbooks’ as I have seen outlined, do seem to be against the concept of a business netbook.

Standard App Screens

I recently blogged about how when you are at home you should have the most screen real estate as possible to make that experience great. However I now want to take a look from a different perspective and that has more to do with the fact that just because you have a huge screen does not mean you have to use it.

Now I had to buy a 22” screen recently purely so I could run an app that had the temerity to require a minimum of 1024 pixels in the vertical. Now they did not have to do this, and it is pretty much bad screen design to require such an outlandishly high pixel count in that direction and not offer a scalable experience down to the more normal levels. What is more normal levels though? Is it 768 pixels or 600 pixels in the vertical?

There used to be a time when applications were designed to work in 640×480 pixels, but I do believe we are now past that. Then they moved on to 800×600, just about the time when the Internet stated to get real big and so design aims of websites also began to assume that the lowest common denominator was 800×600 as well. In more recent times many app vendors and websites have begun to assume that they can have 1024×768 pixels and this was fine until 15 months ago.

This was when the first netbooks began to appear, and those first EeePC 4Gs were 800×480 pixels with scrolling/scaling software to cope with up to 800×600 pixels, which is where I started to really notice that the 1024×768 pixel screen size was pretty much assumed by so many. That Asus though was a bit of a one off, and since the beginning of the year with the 9xx series machines, the MSI and Acer machines it has been pretty much standardised that netbooks have 1024×600 pixel screens.

When running a number of applications, I have received a number of pop-ups when starting applications like Google Earth that state that I will have a ‘reduced experience’ because of my screen resolution. In addition, the number of websites where I basically see only the main banner, adverts and navigation bar and about 2 or 3 lines of content have is many. So what will happen now? Will the availability of netbooks with screen sizes of 1024×600 pixels roll back designers of applications and websites to assume that is the lowest common denominator now?

I certainly hope so, as to assume that you can use the large screen resolutions also gets into the way of some of the best bits of having a multi/large monitor setup – laying out the screen so I can use multiple applications to their fullest.

So you got a Netbook, what now?

You take it home, do the unboxing, get it powered up and running and now what?

1. Get comfortable with the Linux install that you may have inherited or swap it for Windows XP. If it came with XP, then settle in.

2. Get Firefox 3.0 running, OpenOffice 3.0 onboard, get hooked up to WiFi, and get yourself a 3G card unless it is already built in.

3. If you have a netbook with a 2 or 3 cell battery – get out and buy yourself the 6 cell battery as quickly as you can – you do need it.

4. If you have the HP2133, scour the Internet for instructions on how to get it running Linux or Windows XP because that beast is damn slow with Vista.

5. Get yourself setup with Delicious from Yahoo and add its plug-in to your Firefox or Internet Explorer install so that you can have all your cloud bookmarks tagged and running with you and/or get Foxmarks with the password sync – now you will have your bookmarks and passwords synchronised across all of your machines as long as you spread the love a little.

6. Migrate your email over to IMAP4 based services unless you already have it…or better move the whole domain over to Google Apps and use their facilities. This way, your email is always going to be available and not locked to a single machine.

7. Get yourself some web storage like box.net.

8. Sign yourself up to Skype – with that webcam in your machine, you have an ideal tool for getting into VoIP/Video Conferencing and this is on most of the netbooks by default. Share your Skype ID out.

Now assuming that you have progressed to Windows XP on your netbook…

1. Do all the above but in XP of course.

2. Think about Hosted Exchange for business use…it is slightly better than IMAP4.

3. Get Microsoft Mesh on the netbook and all of your other machines, and share the important folders across all of your machines in Peer-to-Peer mode.

4. Make sure that you setup that Skype install.

5. I know it is my preference, but get yourself a Google Reader setup running and make sure all your textual RSS feeds are setup there.

6. Install Juice for podcast downloads and Miro for vodcast downloads, I always find it comforting to have my text/graphics RSS separate to my audio and video feeds, but you could have it all in Miro.

7. Download Windows Live services such as Live Messenger, Live Photo Gallery, and of course Live Writer for blogging.

8. Optimise your netbook setup to maximise battery life when on battery, and run as fast as possible on mains. Use additional power management tools like Notebook Hardware Control to manage the switch automatically.

And then scour the internet for sites that service the optimisation of your particular netbook for those interesting new tweaks.

Oh, and stay with this blog.

Netbooks are not just for Christmas, they are for life

I use my netbook as my primary machine ALL THE TIME. I believe you can never have too much screen real estate but it is a tradeoff on so many things.

When I am running around I find the 10″ screen absolutely great, particularly as anything bigger would be a storage problem in my case/bag and also would not fit on the little tray table on the train/plane. The only time limit I have is the battery.

In terms of the home base however, it would be great if I had as much screen real estate as possible and I get this by plugging in and extending my desktop to a 19″ LCD. This is purely a comfort thing and would happen whether I had a 10″ netbook or a 15″ laptop – you can never have too much screen real estate. In fact, I would love to get a 30″ screen and connect the netbook to it – it can do that fine and look forward to when I do have one.

External keyboards and mice are the same on a netbook as for a laptop.

The netbook is just a multi-purpose processing device that scales to what you need it to do for standard information processing requirements.

Originally posted as a comment by nocky100 on Scripting News using Disqus.

Dedicated Video Conferencing

You may have used or heard of Skype, and some of you may have used its video conferencing capabilities, particularly for keeping in touch with back home when you are away for a trip. This is an excellent piece of software and is a default install on every machine I have. In addition to the software solution, there is a number of devices that make this more that a PC based solution, including connected USB handsets and the excellent WiFi based units but these do no justice to the video capabilities.

Well it seems Asus have released the Asus AiGuru SV1 and it has been given positive reviews in several places including Loic Lemur of Seesmic/LeWeb fame. It indeed looks the business but I have spotted both its flaw and an alternative solution also from Asus (and others!). The biggest flaw is that it costs $299 (which even at the most positive exchange rate would put it at £200+), which leads into how an alternative can be simply produced for a little less than that. The alternative, a more flexible one at that, is to look towards the very nicely priced EeePC 4G or EeePC 900s which would provide you with everything you can find in the SV1 unit for Video Skype plus all of the features of a netbook – and these range from £150 to £230 – and if you want to go to the Acer Aspire One units, these can come in from £179 to £230 as well. These all have Skype with Video support, and these all do so much more. These units also look a whole lot more portable than the Asus AiGuru SV1.

It looks like I have found an excellent use for my older (and less old) netbooks around the house – as dedicated Video conferencing terminals.

Redfly – a miss by a mile

CelioRedfly Celio is a company that has produced the Redfly Smartphone Terminal since earlier this year. They have just released new update hardware in terms of the C7 and C8N, where the differentials are purely in screen size, weight and ‘Media Port’ – all of this for between $229 and $299 (I would expect that to be £180 to £230 over here – around the same RRP as the EeePC 4G to EeePC 900 / Acer Aspire One devices). These are interesting and novel devices which require a Windows Mobile phone to actually provide the processing and software aspect, because they are nothing more than a glorified screen and keyboard. Interesting – yes, successful – no.

This device competes in the same realm as netbooks with none of their advantages of providing you with a similar/same environment to work in as a full desktop, with full client application functionality. What about web applications I hear you ask? well unfortunately this device requires a Windows Mobile Phone as its only host, which means it is hamstrung with the same application limitations – a shoddy browser that is circa 1998 in capability.

They do cling to the enterprise market and push for data security as one of its advantages but sorry, data leaves the company just as easily on a Windows Mobile Phone as for a laptop and is just as obtainable – without going anywhere near my own mantra about the silliness of enforced control measures on devices when the true knowledge in a company is in the employee’s head, and they leave the company every night and no-one requires people’s brains to be locked down. You can use good common sense security mechanisms on a netbook, with greater capability than you can with the Celio Redfly / Windows Mobile combination (can you encrypt the entire storage of a Windows Mobile Phone?).

No, I cannot recommend such a device for anyone. Get a good netbook and a decent mobile phone instead (I say this, and I have a Windows Mobile Phone but then I feel comfortable with its lack of features in the web and application side and I use Exchange for contacts/calendar – the iPhone is calling me right now).

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