If AMD delivers, Intel will take a big hit. I hope this message gets forwarded to some guys in the engineering and marketing departments since this is a good niche with very high profits to take over Intel. Meanwhile we are all stuck with the same low value offers from Intel. Value is at what AMD excels, I hope the company stands for it to come to our rescue as it did with Turion CPUs for notebooks and the spider platform.

Give me hint or contact me if AMD can finally put us out of our misery.

Sorry but this blog and the video seems more like mn why did we missed this.

As stated before you should not compare a net book with a fullsize notebook. Wich will have no longer battery life ( i know cause i own a eee pc 5h and a turion based notebook 3h)

The only right comment is about the way they develop atm beeing fairly priced and small to getting to big and expensive compared to low end notebooks that coe standard with vista.

1. Noisy, why is the fan on all the time! It may have a energy efficient chip but coupled with a old 945 chip set this thing puts out way too much heat. These netbooks shouldn’t even have a fan they should be passively cooled

2. Slow, I didnt do my research and I thought the Atom would be as fast as a Pentium M class processor, it isn’t. The in-order design of this chip may reduced die space but depending on the task being performed this processor can be a REAL dog! Id rather a under-clocked under-volted chip.

3.Battery Life, around 2 hours which isn’t very revolutionary.

4.Screen, Needs 768 lines or resolution, nothing fits, some apps with scream at you for not having at least 1024X768

5. Design/Build Quality, Buzzing speakers, poor touchpad design

At $399, for an extra $100 your can get alot more.

Dont get me wrong I think this form factor has potential. However, a few things need to change, first on the list dump these useless Atom processors!!!

I now use a version with 1280×768 which is about the minimum I can work with having gotten used to 1600×1200 CRT and LCD screens. The 1.06Gb processor and 5400 rpm drive and software rust make for a slow machine, even newly installed.

All portable devices are a compromise and it does depend upon what you are wanting to use them for to determine if they are fit for purpose or not.

Besides the netbook devices a number of low energy machines also running versions of Linux are being heavily publicised in the wake of the netbooks. As these tiny boxes can plug into a full size 1920×1200 screen but even with the 1.6GHz processor can’t run all You Tube videos (a must for my 12 year daughter) and has problems with full screen playback of DV and DVD sources. At a price, and as a second machine they do have a place, e.g. whilst the desktop computer is tied up processing HD video. I do not understand why the processor used is such a bad performer. There are few tasks that I require that an old Pentium 500MHz can’t do that a 3GHz core 2 dual can and mostly that is about recording digital TV, importing DV and HDV and creating DVD outputs.

I opted to get a Nokia N800. It runs also Linux but weights under half of that of the netbooks and runs for over 6 hours on a single supplied battery. On it I loaded several applications including a choice of Media Players, calculators and dictionaries. So it has French, German and Spanish dictionaries, Wikipedia and CIA world fact book, 5000 novels and works of literature, language learning tapes, classic music and also a few hundred pop songs and the odd dozen games. With the internet, web camera and Skype (the school uses Skype to get pupils to work together on projects with children in other countries) it makes for a flexible student’s computer. The netbooks will do the same but weigh more and will not run all day long.

I have used the GPS from my Nokia N95 running maps on the N800 which is better than reading the maps on the N95 but the 800×480 is too small for me to read clearly and at a glance. Web browsing is painfully slow unless you have a clear idea what you are looking for – too many sites need a higher resolution and do not scroll well. It is very good as a media player, but the effort to convert my library of video to the quarter frame size just takes too long. iTunes (AAC) and MP3 are perfect and I sometimes plug it directly into the hi-fi.

Although the netbooks cover the basic PDA and Office functions they do not have the capacity for the attachments e-mailed at work. Large Power Point presentations, Office 2007 documents and spreadsheets that have grown to 40 Mb. Short e-mails fine, but having to read a 100 page Word document with tables and graphics on a small screen is no fun.

A mobile phone like the Nokia N95 and iPhone can be used to look up things on the internet and access online e-mail. I wouldn’t want to do much typing, even with a Bluetooth keyboard but they cover enough PDA and media player functions well enough that they overlap the functionality of the netbook. The keyboard and screen on a netbook is not a sufficient improvement to make them worth carrying. The saving grace is that if it where to get stolen or broken on a trip getting another one is not very expensive, particularly those that are had for under £100, and the memory cards with your data can be transferred from one machine to another. Going for a better specification and running Windows XP brings the cost higher than for a second hand picture book with more RAM, larger storage and bigger screen.

I might be content with a 1280×768 version of the Nokia N800 on a screen over 9” diagonal if it also ran for 7 hours with Wi-fi running and Bluetooth.

Some friends do like their netbooks and use them in the house to look up information, making a few notes or browsing the internet whilst in the pub. I do not see that this is the killer application for these devices. Even though they think they know the limitations it has not stopped them buying more than one PDA, internet tablet and now netbook finding each lacked what they wanted. They don’t want a laptop because of price and size/weight. I feel the longer that they use the netbook the more they will wish it was a more powerful notebook.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2umvQNFPSC8

Those high-end users certainly wont spend $500 on a low-end Dell or HP, which become hot and are bulky/clumsy.

Another point is that the average consumer does not really care too much about HD video on laptops let alone is able to explain what HD video is. They certainly wont expect it to work on a laptop that costs a third of most decent HD TVs.

I do agree with your assessment of prices but increased competition will drive prices down (see Lenovo and Dell’s entries and Asus’s subsequent price cuts). If AMD was in this market, prices would drop further.

For full disclosure, I own a high-end Dell computer, an iMac, a Toshiba Tablet PC, and have now ordered an Asus netbook. I decided to purchase the Asus because it will accomplish what the Toshiba could not: be easy to carry.

I am an eeePC 901 user.

Pat> 1) Extremely Short Battery Life (I only would get 1.5 hours battery life per charge)

What? I am getting at least 5 hours on my eeePC 901. 4+ is typical of all netbooks I have seen.

Pat> 2) Choppy, Unplayable 720P Video Playback?

What? What speed did you hae the Atom set to 1.2 GHz? Watch and learn…

http://jkkmobile.blogspot.com/2008/08/via-nano-vs-intel-atom-hd-playback.html

Pat> 3) Choppy NBCOlympics.com Internet Video and Compromised UI

1200 x 600 is a little small for some pages, but I have smooth wi-fi connection and great internet experience wherever I have been.

Kinda scary that AMD is missing out another market.

next, sorry, but you can’t blame a netbook for a bad website design which doesn’t allow you to scroll to show all content on a small screen.

your test is like testing a geforce2 graphics card with Crysis and blaming it, that it can’t handle it. Well… sure it doesn’t. It was not built for such things.

The only thing which really is a major disadvantage on current netbooks (except for the asus 901 and 1000h) is the battery life. Actually I never heard of a netbook whith 1,5hours only, but even the average 2,5-3 hours is not enough for the target group of customers, which like to have their netbooks with them the whole day – which doesn’t m ake sense if you have to plug them in every now and then.