Despite what the title may have you think, I do want one. However, everything on the market right now is basically crap in one way or another to a point that I can’t convince myself that it’s a worthwhile investment. I love my T61, but it’s a bit bulky, gets hot in one corner, and the one battery is crap now (probably due to heat; 9-cell with 1-2 hours depending on the mood of my cat it seems).
* One thing that I’ve always hated was the touchpad. It’s too finicky and usually just gets in my way. However, I’d like to have one on whatever I get next since I use it for scrolling (everything else is disabled: tapping, movement, buttons, the works). I don’t think I’d be able to work with one (especially if the buttons were on the side) since I’ve gotten so used to the trackpoint. I thought at first that I would be doomed to live with a trackpad until I saw the Sony Vaio P. It has a trackpoint and all three mouse buttons. Unfortunately, it is overpriced and only comes with software I’d rather not give money to.
* I also would like at least 8 hours of battery life. I can get 4-5 hours from the good battery for the T61 and on powersave, so I don’t think this is too outrageous for a netbook.
* It has to come with Linux (or nothing). Even if I’m wiping it for Fedora, I’m not giving money to companies that don’t deserve the money.
* The Insert/Delete/Home/End/PgUp/PgDn keys must exist on their own. Having the latter 4 be modified arrow keypresses is not excusable for me since I use them so often (this kills the Asus machines). It’d be preferable to have them in the standard 2×3 arrangement, but it’s excusable if it means fitting on the machine (laptops don’t have an excuse).
* It has to be less than a kilogram. This is pretty common, but the larger ones tend to approach this limit.
* Sleep and hibernate should work. This is a no brainer, but it currently fails on the T61. It’s not really that much of a problem since boot time is low and the thing isn’t exactly agile either.
* Solid state drive. I have a desktop to tether it to, so 20G would be good, but I could probably work with a 12GB, 8G would be cutting it close. My current installs work on 10G and 15G / partition sizes (/home is the only one that’s separate) and are usually more than half free depending on the debuginfo and mock setup at the time, both of which won’t be happening on the netbook.
* Ethernet port on it. You’d think this would be a given, but the Vaio P is too slim for it and has some weird adapter that’s probably overpriced and defeats the purpose of the thing being so small.
* A webcam would be nice, but it’s not a showstopper.
* It would be nice to have 2G of RAM, but 1G should do it; currently I’m using on 650MB on the laptop and a little over a gig on the desktop with lots of extra stuff running.
Unfortunately, I think it may be a few years until I can find anything on the market that meets these requirements. Even laptops have trouble making them (except for the weight thing which I’d waive for them). Unless there’s one I’m not aware of. Thoughts?
Sounds like you’ve spec’d a smartbook:
http://www.gosmartbook.com/index.html
Hmm, it’s close. Unfortunately, from the picture of it on Wikipedia, it seems as though the Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys are modifiers of the arrows. In addition to speculation that it will come with a wireless data plan (which I could probably care less about, but knowing how things go it’ll be deemed “necessary” to customers). I also don’t see any mouse buttons on it, but it may just be an mini touchpad with what looks like a trackpoint. Control and Fn are flipped from what I’m used to, but it does look like the closest of all the netbooks that the public has seen so far. I’ll have to keep up on the news of it, but I’m not holding my breath. Thanks.
That’s a specific implementation. Just as ‘netbooks’ aren’t a single product, ’smartbooks’ describes a class or category. There are 15 manufacturers planning over 30 devices at this time. Take your pick.
I am still waiting for those ARM based netbooks that promise 12 hours battery and hardware accelerated video, flash (I don’t really care about the flash but still it is a good thing I guess) and 3d. No fans on it and 4GBs of ssd plus 2 or 3 Gig of RAM would do perfectly for me. Multi touch screen would be nice but not mandatory.
So any of those coming any time soon?
I care most of fanless/heatless and long hours of work. But ssd is nice too as it lowers the noise level! So… where do I sign up for one:)
Hear, hear! Why don’t the manufacturers understand this? All they seem to come up with is upsizing, which is pointless.
You have just described a ThinkPad X200!
> Sounds like you’ve spec’d a smartbook:
Not available yet, and uses an ARM CPU (only a secondary architecture for Fedora and they don’t have anything current (their latest tree is based on F10, there are no updates built yet and the entire KDE 4 is still missing in their F10 release packages). The next older tree is F8 (hey, that’s already EOL!), you get at least an apparently-complete KDE 3.5.9 (hey, what happened to our 3.5.10 update?). It seems they’re now working on F11, but KDE is also AWOL there. I’d stay clear of anything ARM (or non-x86 in general) for Fedora.
@Ricardo:
Unfortunately, only comes with Windows.
@Mace:
I was looking at the Wiki page for smartbooks, not any specific one. If it’s accurate, they’ll turn out to be just as unfit as netbooks are today
@Kevin:
Since it’d mostly be tethered, I could run another DE and VNC to the desktop until I can move PIM-ish stuff to the mobile one. It’s basically what I’m doing with the laptop now, except “mobile” is less applicable.