Rapid Web News

With technology getting much smaller and quicker are these so called ‘netbooks’ just another name for a small laptop or is there something that sets them apart? Let’s take a look…

Amongst the first to hit the shelves was the Asus Eee PC 900 series which had a 900 MHz processor, 1 gig of RAM (2 gig max), 20 gig total solid state drive and a shade off a 9” screen pre loaded with Linux. Now that may not seem like a huge spec plus it doesn’t have a CD drive so what’s so special about them? Well I have to say for a general use compact laptop it was pretty good! The SSD drive coupled with Linux made start up and loading times respectable and provided you pre-installed the software you needed (Via a 30 quid external DVD drive) you were set for a good 8 hours of computing, ideal for the on-the-road workplace.

Just how popular are these tiny laptops though? Well sales figures for 2008 suggest 14.6 million units shipped and with a considerable amount of commercialisation figures for 2009 will supposedly be around the 26.3 million mark with ASUSTek hovering around the 70% market share, cha ching I hear you cry. Prices start from around £140 too so very affordable especially for the kids.

The specs are changing a lot though and becoming more like laptops. With the removal of SSD drives in favour of standard SATA hard-drives and Windows instead of Linux all seems to be bumping the price up. If you do fancy looking at a few models here is a good place to start.

Finally some news on the Google OS! Netbooks, apparently, will be the first hardware that sees Google’s shiny new software in 2010. It will be open source like Ubuntu so developers can tinker and contribute; they’ve claimed it will be ‘Blazingly Fast’ using a system of ‘Cloud Computing’ built around Google’s web browser released last year.

Sundar Pichai, Google’s vice president of product management stated; “…With Google Chrome OS, we’ve made computing faster, easier and safer than ever before. While we still have a long way to go, we are excited by the progress we have made so far and look forward to developing the technology in the open with the help of the open source community. We want it to be like a TV – turn it on and it’s booted up…”

Although this statement was quite puzzling, seeing how they’re keeping it open source; “…As a consumer, you can’t go download Chrome OS, you will have to go and buy a Chrome OS device…” but as ever I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.