Rounding up the latest Netbooks

Dan Ackerman, Senior Editor April 6, 2009

The last couple of months have seen pretty much every big player in the PC market jump into the Netbook game with both feet. While we used to talk about Asus and MSI as dominant brands, now it's Dell, HP, and Lenovo.

The category continues to grow; after all, for around $500 (or less) you can take advantage of Internet access, e-mail, word processing, music playback, and even online video streaming. Netbooks do all of these things fairly well. We've got a video version of this roundup available as well.

The Dell Mini 9 is a good starting point. It's got standard Netbook components, but a nice design without a lot of wasted space. On the down side, your hard drive options top out at a 32GB SSD, and the Function-key row has be reassigned to alternate keys on one of the letter-key rows.

Samsung enters the US market with the NC10. It's about as generic and middle-of-the-road as Netbooks get--which is fine, really. And we do appreciate the fairly sizable keyboard and excellent battery life.

Lenovo's Netbook, the IdeaPad S10, has a nice slim design and one unique feature that helps it stand out from the crowd, an ExpressCard slot. This is useful for plugging in accessories, like a mobile broadband modem.

HP's new Mini 1000 is probably my favorite of the current crop of Netbooks, for one reason--it has a really fantastic keyboard. It also doesn't have quite as many ports and connections as some of these other models, but if the tiny keyboards are what's keeping you away from a Netbook, this is one to check out.

Netbooks are good for a lot of things, but gaming ain't one of them. So what if someone jammed a discrete video card into one of these systems? Asus did that with the N10J, which has an Nvidia GPU that you can turn on and off to save battery life. The results? Pretty good actually, as long as you keep your expectations modest and your game resolution set to 800x600.