Netbook Review UK

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3g Connectivity

A netbook that can’t connect to the internet is a PDA that won’t fit in your pocket — which is why you can’t get one without Wi-Fi. But 3G is now mature, fast and cheap enough to use, while the network operators are desperate to populate their expensive infrastructure with lots of people. Combine that with a glut of affordable 3G silicon, and 3G becomes the new Wi-Fi.

Get Ready for the Cloud

Netbooks love the cloud, and the cloud loves netbooks. A cheap, powerful, relatively fast, ultra-connected device that’s good enough to do real work on, but not designed to handle those big old, fat old corporate applications? Why, they’re all waiting for you in the cloud. And the cloud will happily suck up everything on your netbook and keep it safe, so that if you do break it, lose it, upgrade it or reset it, you can restore your entire mobile netbook life with a wave of your 3G connection.

More Cores

At first glance, putting teraflop chips in a £250 netbook is akin to shoving a Rolls Royce Trent jet engine on a pushbike — you’ll live just long enough to die. But the basic equation behind multi-core chips — that you can get high performance out of a bunch of relatively slow CPUs more efficiently than one very fast, very hot single-core chip — works just as well if you want to get good-enough performance at very low power consumption. That’s completely unexplored at the moment, but as software starts to get good at multi-core CPUs and chip-makers continue to up the core count, we’ll see some interesting developments at the very low end of the client market.

Processor Competition

While Intel is promising that the next generation of Atom will be an ARM-killer in smartphones, ARM is being just as bullish about its architecture and netbooks. No, Windows won’t run on an ARM processor, but Linux is as happy as a penguin in a shoal of herring. And with the ARM architecture comes a lot of good stuff — the mobile phone industry is already a master of including tons of hardware for video, audio, communications and peripherals on the same silicon as an ARM core. Imagine the inventiveness and competitive energy of smartphone makers in a proper netbook form factor.

All Day Battery Life

We’re almost there with some of the bigger battery packs, if you don’t mind typing slowly in the dark. But as the netbook market grows and evolves away from using older chip designs, some of the extremely effective power management in newer products will kick in. And barely a day goes by without someone in a white coat announcing a major breakthrough in lithium ion cell construction. Most of those won’t make it, but enough will.

Boot Times- Insant On!

Why, exactly, does a low-power design with all its data in flash memory have to ever really turn off? No, we don’t know either. The architectural divisions in PC design — where a separate BIOS chip runs through a whole set of pointless tests before letting the processor get going on an operating system that loads off a slow hard disk before firing up the user environment — are just a hangover. Bung everything in the same flash memory, have a decent suspend mode, build your OS like Splashtop so it gets going quickly when you do have to start from scratch, and forget you ever had to wait three minutes to get a browser up.

Multi-touch

Yeah, it works. People like it. It lets people who don’t understand computers do clever things, and looks very cool in demonstrations. There’s virtually no extra hardware cost, the APIs and applications are being rolled out anyway, and it doesn’t get in the way of anything.

GPS

Why on earth put GPS in a netbook, when you’ll be using it indoors most of the time and the device’s size makes it impractical to use when you’re actually on the move? Well, location-based services that hook into local transport and infrastructure work a lot better on a bigger screen, as does any sort of mapping; devices that know where they are (even if you don’t know where they are) have lots of security advantages; and the darn stuff’s so cheap now that you might as well have it.