Sunday, January 31, 2010

A difficult netbook decision to make

It all started out after receiving a work gift for all our hard work to get the Intel AppUp Center going. That work gift was a netbook, a Samsung N140, pretty nice indeed... the gift and also having your effort to get the job done appreciated in some context :-)

The dilemma is that Ive been a netbook user for a while, I recently upgraded my old EEE 701 with 4GB of flash storage which was already pretty nice (yes I'm kind of an early adopter) to a Acer Aspire One D250 and happily and actively using it a lot more than my desktop or my heavy notebook.

So here's the comparison table, with the stuff that matters to me:






































FeatureSamsung N140Acer Aspire One D250
Hard Disk250160
Keyboard LanguageSpanish InternationalCanadian
Battery Life~6 hours/6 cells~3 hours/3 cells
Latest and greatest WiFI tech802.11n802.11g
Cost~400 U$D~300 U$D


So here's the thing. I might not want to switch netbooks even though the Samsung N140 seems so much better, well more autonomy and disk space is a winner in my book; the downside for me is the keyboard, Spanish... and I'm not too fond of that.

What am I to do with this? I was thinking of using it as a desktop replacement with a standard keyboard and mouse attached to it displaying the bits to be seen on a big monitor of course.

The other thing I can do is sell... I'm not into that though... but if it comes to it, it might be what needs to be done.

Then again, with all the extra features it has, I might just have to learn to deal with the keyboard be done with it, that is once I check that OpenSolaris works well on this one :-)