I used to have some larger laptops (IBM Thinkpad T series) which had a lot of good things going for it. A few years ago I switched over to the X series and now have an X61 tablet which is pretty nice.
Lately I’ve had the desire to go even smaller, mostly so that whenI go on trips, I don’t need to take quite s much stuff as I usually do. I’d call myself a road warrior, but that’s not quite true. I spend a good bit of time traveling to and from work and we have frequent trips to NY to visit family, and I have a trip to HI for a wedding in February.
A few weeks ago, I saw that a friend had an EEE 2G Surf with Linux installed. He was kind enough to let me borrow it while I try to figure out the form factor and see if this is something I want to spend my money on.
My requirements, in no particular order, are:
- charge my blackberry and RAZR
- be able to get photos off my Nikon D40 and upload them to my gllery.
- wifi and bluetooth
- big enough keyboard so it’s not too difficult to type
After playing with the EEE, this is not quite for me. The keyboard is cramped, the screen is tiny, and there’s no bluetooth to tether up with the blackberry. But it’s darn close. The wifi is great, and I can charge the blackberry and razr, which is great. The camera will connect via usb, but doesn’t show any photos, but I can slip the memory card in the SDHC slot and upload from there directly to gallery or gallery2.
I’m writing this on the EEE now, so let me explain a bit about the keyboard. First, I’m touch typist and usually hit the shift key with my right pinky finger.
For the keys on the keyboard, the right shift key is smaller than the left one and is right next to the up arrow. So far, I’ve wiped out three sentences by hitting both keys at once, which causes the shift to be recognized first, then the up arrow, which causes the entire line to be highlighted. Since it’s habit for me to hit shift and the character I want in uppercase, that line gets wiped out, replaced with a single uppercase character.
I’m starting to focus on the Dell Inspiron Mini 9. It’s low cost, has ubuntu installed, and has bluetooth. Dell seems to be more amenable to ‘hacking’, so I can get a low-cost refurb and add features that aren’t installed.
The Ideapad looks nice, but it’s pricey and has XP installed. Installing Ubuntu over it could work, but I’d rather give support to companies that have native Linux support, at least in this instance. Netbook hardware can be pretty custom and I don’t want a lot of hardware grief.
All of the netbooks I’m looking at have only 3-6 hours of life, which isn’t bad compared to regular laptops.