I am back in the market for a laptop and willing to get rid of my too small to type on Asus EEE PC 1000 and my overweight Samsung R60+ (3kg plus adaptor), acquired because I had to type.
Recently, I finally laid hands on the Samsung NC20 (favourable Wired review here; video here). It’s the best netbook I’ve seen yet. The keyboard is just about OK. All in all it’s ok, but somehow it didn’t really speak to me.
However, I only got to see a white one with the sort of plastic I am sure would be grubby-looking in a few weeks. Somehow I just couldn’t quite bring myself to buy it.
I think I have tried every keyboard of every kind of laptop and netbook for sale in London. Most are unspeakable and they are getting worse.
Lenovo, it seems, make the best keyboards but their laptops are overpriced and their only netbook is an undistinguised horror, a me-too product with a keyboard for people with square fingers. It hasn’t shown that it realizes that the market has changed forever (how it happened). According to Tim Bajarin laptops over $1,ooo are now a dead category. Here he is on what’s next: 12 and 13 inch machines with double the resolution and memory of netbook PCs, at a few hundred dollars more.
None are available yet. The first in the UK will likely be the MSI X340 and X320 machines (video), which resemble more affordable Macbook Air computers. Supposedly they’ll be on sale in two weeks.
Meanwhile, Lenovo is asking for comments on what it should do about the netbook category on its design blog.
A black ThinkPad machine like the Samsung NC20, weighing 1.5kg or less, with quality keyboard would already be very tempting. It must have an all day battery, must run Ubuntu (and Windows 7), have 802.11n Ethernet and Bluetooth, a non-glare touch screen, and it should run COLD and quiet. Not just do most machines, even very expensive ones like the Macbook Air, now have crappy keyboards many of them run HOT, including Lenovo’s S10.
Beyond specs, however, I think the right thing to do is to take a leaf from Apple’s iPhone book and rent these devices on a subscription that provides an incentive to upgrade to a later model.
Options like online backup, insurance, location tracking and remote reformatting will be where the money is… services, not hardware. If you lose one it would be nice to trigger a reformat and get a replacement delivered by courier.
Related posts:
- Netbook And Phone Convergence It seems that Samsung will be the first to upsize a netbook to a mini laptop with a decent keyboard while retaining many of the...
- Goldilocks Laptop Finally At last I have a lightweight laptop with a keyboard that is a pleasure to use. Indeed, it’s the best keyboard on any laptop I’ve...
- Bluetooth Keyboards Again I considered bringing my Ubuntu-powered Asus 1000 netbook on this trip but decided in favour of the much larger Samsung R60+ (which I reviewed here)....
- It’s The Keyboard, Stupid A Mac-using friend sent me this link to an article on how Mac users were taking matters into their own hands and installing OSX on...
- Asus EEE PC 1000 Update My post a few weeks ago about the Asus EEE PC 1000 is still drawing quite a lot of traffic (dozens of hits) every day....
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