What I want from my next netbook/small laptop:
- As much battery life as possible (I’ve heard 14 hours quotes is possible)
- The ability to easily upgrade the memory to 4Gb
- A keyboard and trackpad that I can learn to love as much as my current Dell Mini
- A decent screen resolution, but a fairly small screen size
- The ability to run either Mac OS X or some flavour of Linux on it
I think I might be describing the 11″ Macbook Air (which I can’t justify buying, not even for work), but I probably should start thinking about a replacement for my Dell Mini as it’s 2 years old, quite battered, and only lasts about 2.5 hours away from the charger.
But in the meantime, for my upcoming trip to Edinburgh I’ll be relying on the mini, a 50% share in the work Macbook Pro, plus possibly a loaned iPad (we’re going to the UCISA conference in Edinburgh and they seem keen to loan all sorts of tech out to delegates).
I've been happy with my Acer Inspire 1410 for the combo of netbook size & price, with proper sized keyboard & laptop performance.Don't know about installing Linux etc, but I imagine the internet would be your friend for that. Battery usage isn't as high as you'd like (i think about 3-4 hours?) but you can also buy it with (or buy additionally, can't recall?) a chunkier battery block which will improve that.That was bought about a year ago, so there's probably something better out now within the same range.