Netbooks — Are they a low cost mobile option?

In the past couple of months, technologists seem to be on the Netbook bandwagon and moving it quickly forward. Mobile professionals certainly might find this niche product line a good choice. But recently many schools have started to look at these small mobile notebooks as possible 1-to-1 computing solutions. However, are Netbooks really a good replacement for notebooks?

Netbooks are lightweight (2.25 lbs roughly) notebooks with small screens in the 8.9 to 10.2 inch range. They use lower-powered processors and are limited in how much RAM they can have installed in them. I configured an HP Mini 1000 series Netbook as if I were going to buy them for a 1-to-1 deployment in a school. This Mini 1000 has Windows XP Pro SP3, a 16 GB solid-state drive in place of the traditional 60 GB hard drive, no optical drive, wireless G networking and 1 GB of RAM. Accidental 3 year warranty protection was added, assuming that with children involved, machines will break.

The cost of a Netbook like this is $779.00. Ouch! In the world of school notebooks, your money seems to be better spent on the 5 – 6 pound full-functionality notebook for a few dollars more. However, I think $779 is reasonable for mobile business professionals where many of their applications are run remotely and over the Internet.

I am going to continue to monitor the Netbook phenomenon and its availability of Windows 7 in the summer of 2009. Perhaps the hardware and software will have matured and the cost will have become more reasonable for school deployments.