I’ve been looking into possibilities for a new netbook. Part of me is surprised to find that there really aren’t a lot of good choices out there. Part of that is my own criteria for a netbook- basically a small sub-$400 laptop with limited resources. By small, I’m limiting it to anything smaller than a 10″ screen. Of course, with the explosion in the tablet market I guess I shouldn’t be totally surprised. Netbooks are slowly getting replaced by these lighter, slightly less traditional computer machines.
I was very intrigued by the Acer AO521, but it seems to be made of unobtanium and it doesn’t look like that’s going to change any time soon. After that, the only other manufacturer I’ve seen that I’ve liked is Asus and the 1015PEM and 1015PN models. Both have dual core Intel Atom processors. The big difference is that the 1015PN has Nvidia Ion2 for the graphics, giving it a considerable performance boost. Not surprisingly, the extra performance comes at the cost of battery life.
Between the two, my preference is for the 1015PN. But I’m still kind of curious to see what else might come along this year. So far, there doesn’t appear to be much though.