I know that recently oceans of ink have been spilled and billions of electrons sprayed debating the question: Who needs a netbook? I know the arguments well: These small laptop-style machines are neither fish nor fowl—too underpowered to do "real work" and too big to tote around in your pocket.
Well, I'm here to tell you that the naysayers are all wrong. I believe the netbook is a truly fabulous new class of gadget.
So much so that I bought one—an Asus Eee PC* with an 8.9-inch screen, about 20 gigs of flash memory, and Windows XP*—for about $500 for the two months of European travel I was planning with my wife and 12-year-old daughter.
This was going to be a weird trip—with not much planned in advance, we were just going to follow our noses, bumming around Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Portugal like college kids (except that it's been about 30 years since I was in college).
Now that my trip is drawing to a close, I can tell you that my netbook was an extremely useful and cool piece of technology to have along.
My wife and daughter both blogged about our experiences, sharing our trip with friends and family with several updates every week. We found Wi-Fi connectivity wherever we needed it—usually free—in places as big as Athens to as small as Urgup, Turkey.
Similarly, I was able share trip photos that I uploaded to my Picasa* web album every few days.
We used the netbook to do everything from making overnight train reservations in Istanbul to finding bus schedules in the Greek islands to Google Earth*-ing whatever neighborhood or city or island we were visiting to better understand its geography.
We turned to Wikitravel on the netbook repeatedly to find out, say, the history of a Byzantine church on the Greek island of Thira. We brought along relatively few bulky travel books. (My suitcase for our entire trip was just airline carry-on size.)
Both my wife and I stayed in touch with our elderly parents, assuring them we had not dropped off the face of the earth, by using Skype* to connect with them every week or so from the netbook. Earlier today from Lisbon, I called my mom to wish her happy birthday. Perfect connection.
Never once did I worry about the machine getting lost, dropped, or stolen because it was small enough to toss in a little backpack with plenty of extra room for a camera, windbreaker, water bottle, whatever. And because the machine did not cost a few thousand dollars, I worried zero about babying it.
My sole regret was that I was seriously itchy to pick up my netbook, and was unwilling to wait for an Intel® Atom™ processor-powered machine to hit the market. The battery life that my Intel® Celeron® processor-based Eee PC delivers is about three hours. I'd like six or seven. But just for the record, the Intel® Celeron® processor handled my photos fine (although I did not edit them, just uploaded them), and played some TV shows that my daughter got on iTunes with no hiccups at all.
I plan to use my netbook a bunch once I get home, when I want to do stuff online, but don't want to haul along my laptop with an Intel processor inside.
Does my Intel® processor-based netbook kick up rooster-tails of dust when I start it? Does it glow like a spacecraft on the launch pad? No, it's not a powerful or glitzy system.
But it was absolutely perfect for what I needed. And I have a hunch that people all over the world will soon discover their own uses for this kind of easy, friendly technology.
Want to take your computer wherever, whenever? Look for ultra-portable netbooks with an Intel® Atom™ processor inside for everything you need to explore the endless possibilities of your connected world.
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