In defense of netbooks

Most people have heard of netbooks, right? Yes, the 10 inch screened, Intel Atom N270/N280 + Intel GMA 950-equipped miniature computers that can't do anything but word processing? They are like Marmite, you either love or loathe them. Some people loathe them because of their non-HD compatible processors (I admit, even HQ YouTube is a struggle) and smaller keyboards, touchpads and screens. Some people do not see the point if you can do 90% of what a netbook can do (which is 10% of what a laptop can do) on something like an iPod touch, which costs less and can fit in a pocket. Some people just plain don't like either XP or 7, or the myriad Linux flavours such as Ubuntu, that run on them. In any case, they are wrong.


Wrong? Why? First, I do admit that netbooks have limitations: they can't do HD Flash, they can't play Crysis (I said it), and they can't make another Avatar. But, for all their foibles, don't you just love their cute charm; their plucky determination that puts up to the ridicule that sometimes befalls on them. Right now, I am writing this post on my own Dell Mini 10v, which I love to pieces. Costing the moderate sum of £253 (including £20 discount), from Dell's UK online store and customised to my liking, it is used by me far more often than my desktop, which sits off for days at a time at some points.

Because I didn't need XP, and was actually getting this for as little as I could, I chose Ubuntu Linux to be installed (Thank you Dell for actually giving me this option!), along with the 6-cell battery (it is by no means discrete, but what is the point of a netbook without 5-7 hours of battery?), Product (RED) lid and the 802.11a/b/g/n card. The default Ubuntu install that Dell provides is 1. old, very very old (Ubuntu 8.04, which came out April 08) and 2. broken (Dell manage to break the package management software for some moronic reason). But still, I didn't pay for it, anyway! Discarding the Ubuntu install as soon as I laid hands on it for an install of Moblin v2.0, I came across a problem: Broadcom-based WLAN = NO out-of-the-box WiFi for Linux. I had to connect it via an Ethernet cable to get the driver! But quickly I found that although Moblin was nice, it wasn't nice enough (among the problems, it had a gawdawful web browser with fewer features than iPhone OS Safari and although it had built-in Twitter and Last.fm support, it didn't have facebook! What is the point in that? So, then I installed the RC of Windows 7, which worked perfectly apart from the fact that my Dell has an 8GB SATA SSD, and although possible it is by no means practical to install a standard 7 Ultimate install on it. So, attempt no.2 at Windows 7 RC, now VLited, worked. For 4 days, until Windows had decided to make several half-gigabyte files that could not be deleted, at all. So, I went back to Moblin and then tried to dual-boot with Ubuntu Netbook Remix. But the bootloaders in each didn't like each other and they continuously tried to nuke each other. Around this time, Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala, for the record) came out so I just bit the bullet and installed Karmic. And it worked! Although I still had to connect via Ethernet to get the Broadcom drivers installed, it actually worked fine. The touchpad was much less flaky than on Moblin (the Mini 10v touchpad is among the worst in the world) and all the keys worked as well. And as an added bonus, I still had over half of my 8GB SSD drive left free!

So, what about the Mini 10v itself? Well, as I got it with an SSD, and it has no internal fan, it is completely solid-state. And well built, too. Well, not in the expensive-materials kind of way but it is as solid as a brick and I would have no worries about taking it to school. The keyboard is better than the USB Dell keyboard I use on my desktop, being extremely clickity with no sagging or bendiness at all. The screen is extremely bright, with it being very readable at lowest brightness settings and with good, but not perfect, colours and viewing angles.

So, in conclusion, I can use it anywhere in the house, from in the kitchen to when sitting on the sofa to being in bed. I could probably drop it and it would be fine. I stream all my media from my home server so I do not need any stored on the netbook itself, and I always have my iPod touch with me anyway for music and apps. I know that tablets will probably replace the netbook, and that Moore's law will mean that the iPhone of 2012 can do more than my Dell. With Google Chrome OS and the impending revolution of extremely cheap, ARM-based smartbooks, the Intel based mobile computing device will fade into insignificance. But. do I care? No.