The Mini-Notebook is causing a buzz in the PC market. Asus has just started selling the Asus Eee PC Notebook with Windows XP Home installed, and now HP has announced a series of mini-notebooks called the “HP 2133 Mini-Note PC” (see “A Student PC under 3 Pounds and $600“). If I did not already own an Asus Eee PC I would really be tempted, as I own several HP computers, from Pocket PCs to full-size desktop PCs. HP has seen that there is a market for light and cheap notebooks, with around 500,000 Eee PC’s sold last year, according to this article “PC Makers Race to Market With Low-Cost ‘Netbooks’” from the Wall Street Journal.

So what is the attraction of a mini notebook? I’ll use the Asus Eee PC with Linux installed as an example. The biggest attraction next to price is probably size and weight. It is easy to carry around, and ideal for traveling. Connecting to the Internet via Wi-Fi or an Ethernet cable is a snap. The web browser is Firefox, which only differs from Firefox for Windows in the menu layout, but this is a general Firefox for Linux difference. Because it uses a solid state drive for a hard drive, the Asus Eee PC Notebook runs surprisingly quietly. The fast start up and shutdown (with Windows XP it will probably be a slower) is really great. It also supports SDHC Cards, which are up to 16GB, with 32 GB cards on the way – but the latter will cost more than the Eee PC!. There are three USB 2.0 ports available for USB devices. In my experience, using USB Flash drives (for transferring large files) on Windows and using them on the Eee PC is basically the same. If you are not going to do much more than word processing, writing emails or web browsing the Asus Eee PC is ideal. The trade off of course is that the keyboard is small and takes a some getting used to. The 7 inch screen is small, and sometimes requires scrolling to see an entire webpage or a dialog box.

Mini-Notebooks like the Asus Eee PC and the HP 2133 Mini-Note PC are called “Netbooks” (see the “Thoughts on Netbooks” article on the Technology@Intel Blog).

Posted on April 9th, 2008 by mervyn