Niggling pains? You need a netbook

• Article 3 of 3
• Crew, August 2009

Hernias, back pains, sore shoulders, twisted necks: sometimes you have to wonder why PC World doesn’t join forces with one of those new multi-clinics or a chiropractor. Because no matter how you look at it, there’s a very good reason that computer firms stopped calling laptops ‘portable computers’ – they’re actually real pains to cart around with you.

Okay, even the first ‘portable computers’ were nightmares designed to show off what a fine figure of a man Arnold Schwarzenegger was when he was straining under the weight of a few bricks’ worth of silicon. But for a while, being small, portable and something you could genuinely put on your lap without damaging your knees was a key selling point of many laptops.

Now, though, the average laptop isn’t designed for portability: it’s designed to take up less space in a student’s pokey bedsit; it’s supposed to be as powerful as a desktop so you can play World of Warcraft while you’re in MacDonald’s, a burger in one hand, the life of your mage in the other; it’s supposed to let a goatee-wearing film editor, a director, three assistant editors, Robert Downey Jr and most of Los Angeles see how work’s going with Iron Man 2’s special effects on its massive 40” screen without anyone having to leave the set.

A free carry bag with your new laptop? A free trolley or a fork-lift truck would be more useful, particularly if you’re travelling all over the world, taking your computer with you from destination to destination.

But a little while ago, someone noticed that for most people, just being able to send emails, browse the Internet, write a few letters or upload some photos or movies for everyone to look at is all they really need from a laptop. A graphics card that needs its own power station, a 17” screen that’s big enough for your neighbour to read and enough sockets and ‘ports’ that if anyone ever asks you for a cigar lighter, you’ll probably be able to help them out? Not so much.

And thus was born the ‘netbook’. Designed to be cheap, light and small enough that you can fit it into your carry-on luggage and still have room for a book and some duty frees, the netbook is a scaled down laptop. It’s usually only got a 10” display or smaller. There’s often no hard drive, but a ‘flash’ based storage system like you’d find in a digital camera, which means it’s less likely to go wrong and will start up far more quickly. The sockets have all but gone, replaced by a wireless network card and the ones that are actually useful, like a USB port and a headphone socket. And as if all that weren’t selling point enough, they typically come with either an easy-peasy version of Linux or good old Windows XP. Not Windows Vista. That’s a cheery thought, though, isn’t it?

If you still want a few bells and whistles, what you’ll get are typically useful bells and whistles like adaptors for your camera’s memory card or a webcam, rather than something that lights up in the dark so that you’re not frightened of the bears.

The first brilliant thing about the netbook is the price: you can find netbooks starting at just £130 – which is cheaper than an iPhone, even with a contract – and working their way up to just over £300 before computer makers start to ‘blur’ the definition of what a netbook is. The second brilliant thing is the weight: usually around three pounds or a bit over a kilo. Compare that with the six pounds or so of even the lightest of 15” laptops and you can see that over a day, the chances of doing yourself a damage from lugging a computer around with you are significantly reduced.

For anyone used to all the power of a desktop in a laptop, a netbook can feel a little claustrophobic. They’re often not that expandable and come with a relatively low, but not awful spec. And if you have fingers like sausages, typing might be more challenging than normal. But for most people, they’re just fine.

More to the point, they are for ‘most people’ rather than the serious gamer, business user or researcher working on the meaning of life, the universe and everything. And ‘most people’ want something that doesn’t look like their taste was surgically bypassed when they bought their computer, particularly if they’re going to spending lots of time in stylish, Internet-equipped bars and coffee shops with their computers.

So netbooks often look better than their laptop counterparts, and come in a range of colours and stylish designs. The Toshiba NB200 costs £319 and would give Apple a run for their money in the style stakes – if Apple bothered to make netbooks. Asus more or less invented the netbook market with its Eee PC and continues to produce excellent products like the 701SDX, which comes in black, white and pink, is A5-sized and weighs under two pounds. Even dull old Dell has a range of £150 Inspiron Minis that come in six different colours.

There are even designer bags for netbooks. Vodafone sells a deep-red croc print bag for their netbooks that is inspired by PPQ’s signature Gabriel bag. Yes, Vodafone. Why them? Well, the key term in netbook is net, of course, and a netbook without an Internet connection does feel a bit like a chocolate teapot, even if you can still run Solitaire on it. So many mobile phone companies will give you a netbook for free if you subscribe to a mobile 3G Internet package. The 3G connection might come built into the netbook or you might have to plug a dongle into a USB port, but if by some miracle you come across a town without a Starbucks, you’ll still have access to the Internet.

Netbooks are the first computers that can truthfully be called portable. They’re cheap, they’re definitely cheerful and they won’t break either your back or your bank account.