When Laptops Go Light

Source: asus.com ASUS EEE PC 1000HE Netbook

Did you hear about the new Hilton NanoSuites? You get a single bed in a room about 8 feet square — and no shower.

There, you can dine on McDonald’s new McSliders: burgers the size of a half-dollar, with two drops of ketchup.

You might wash those down with a Coke Swigger — a cute minican that holds three ounces of noncarbonated cola.

What’s that you say? Those are deeply compromised concepts that would bomb in the marketplace? Well, of course they are; I made them up.

The popularity of netbooks, on the other hand, is real.

A netbook is a laptop with a shrunken screen, an undersize keyboard and a processor that’s so slow, you’d have laughed at it in 2007. The netbooks’ crucial attractions are tiny dimensions, light weight and low cost, usually $350 to $500. Otherwise, they’re all about compromises.

The term “netbook” is a euphemism, intended to stress its main functions: e-mail, Web browsing, chat, Skype and word processing. The hope is to distract you from what netbooks are too feeble to do well: Photoshop, video editing, games and so on.

But these days, price and size are enough to make netbooks a hot seller; ABI Research estimates that we’ll buy 35 million of them this year, and 139 million in 2013. It wasn’t always this way. When netbooks arrived a couple of years ago, they were so tiny, only spider monkeys would find them usable. But as they’ve inched up in size and usability, their sales have taken off.

Now, in fact, there are so many netbooks that keeping them straight would be a full-time job — and it is, for Joanna Stern of Laptop magazine. Since she’s seen it all, I asked her to recommend the best four netbooks for my review.

In general, these four have identical specs: Windows XP ;1 gigabyte of memory; 1.6-gigahertz Intel Atom processor; 160-gigabyte hard drive; Wi-Fi wireless; 3 U.S.B. jacks; a webcam above the screen; video output and Ethernet jacks; and a memory-card slot.

Each has a 1024-by-600-pixel, 10-inch screen. The speakers are tiny and tinny, and online video can be a tad jerky. And there’s no way to install software from a disc unless you buy an external DVD drive.

Finally, all of these netbooks have tiny trackpads and even tinier clicker buttons. Fortunately, you won’t care; you can tap and double-tap right on the trackpad instead of aiming for the clicker buttons. Here’s how they stack up:

ASUS EEE PC 1000HE ($375) Why are Asus’s computers named Eee? Was somebody dictating name ideas when a mouse ran across the desk? Anyway, the 1000HE is clad in glossy black or blue, and it has a battery that lasts for more than seven hours.

Now, the trouble with a battery that big is, yes, that it’s big. The Asus battery creates a bulge at the hinge that lifts the machine off the table and makes it uncomfortable on your knees. It also adds weight; the Asus is the heaviest netbook in this roundup (3.2 pounds? For shame!).

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The keyboard feels cramped but nicely springy. Its tiny trackpad is multitouch-sensitive, meaning that you can scroll by dragging two fingers, or magnify or shrink Web pages, photos and documents by pinching or spreading two fingers (thank you, Apple).

There are four handy buttons at the top edge, two of which you can assign to favorite programs. Nice touch; the more you can accomplish without using the infinitesimal trackpad, the more efficient you get.

MSI WIND U120 ($330) The MSI Wind’s clean, simple, black-and-white design embraces crisp “folds” in its plastic rather than the rounded edges of its rivals.

This 2.6-pound machine, too, has a “six-cell” (bulky) battery. Strangely, though, it provides only 4.5 hours of life; it ought to go much longer.

The keyboard feels terrific. As on most netbooks, many keys control a secondary function (for example, brightness or volume) when you press the function key; on the Wind, secondary functions are labeled in blue on the white keys and are easy to see.

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The software uses facial recognition as a security measure — if it’s not your face, you can’t log into Windows. Unfortunately, you can’t upgrade this laptop’s memory. There’s no trackpad shortcut for scrolling. But how can you argue with $330?

SAMSUNG NC10 ($440) Samsung’s netbook looks great (from the top, anyway), with a glossy, round-edge lid and cool glowing status lights (like the power button hiding in the right hinge). At 93 percent of full size, the keyboard is relatively roomy. You even get dedicated Page Up/Page Down keys, which are missing on the other three netbooks.

CONTINUED : Not-bad compromises

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