Dryden;1651733; said:
Nice job Dell. You're only four years behind Apple.
Heh, I don't see how that's 4 years behind apple, it's running android, which is fairly new to the notebook/netbook/watever market, which multitasks, is open development and focus's on the things that apple's iphone OS lacks.
Speaking of netbooks, I really got a chance to dive into one yesterday. My boss is going to Hawaii so he ordered a Dell Inspiron Mini 10 so that he wouldn't have to lug around his mammoth executive laptop with the faux woodgrain finish. So what does he do? Since the Mini 10's battery life is such shit he buys it with the optional 6-cell battery. The thing was a brick - it must have weighed 4 or 5 pounds with the 6-cell and was over an inch thick beneath the hinge. And in any environment, on battery or on AC power off the wall charger, the Atom processor was absolute garbage trying to run just preinstalled XP home. It took me 15 minutes just to get his email sync functions setup (this is a 30 second process in Outlook on a fast machine, on virtually any smartphone, including my own iPhone, or in Thunderbird). The trackpad/button design was the absolute worst feature of the Mini 10 though. The pad is the normal width of a trackpad on any conventional laptop (about 2") but is only half as tall (maybe 5/8s or 3/4"). The buttons are not separate, but are part of the pad's single piece design, yet the pad also supports touch-sensitive presses in place of the buttons like a regular laptop track pad. In a word, it was a fucking trainwreck. For instance, I'd be scrolling left and go to click the right-button on an icon to select properties, only to have the mouse pointer jump 600 pixels over to the right. I fought the trackpad the entire time I used it.
I have a mini-9, with the ssd and it doesn't have these trackpad issues, however, it wasn't long before I kissed that friggin xp home goodbye. Beyond the enormous security holes that came with it, I wanted a linux machine that I could run some essential apps to my work functions, and at the time I didn't have my laptop, so it worked fine. I fucking hate the keyboard though. A few weeks ago I upgraded the SSD to 64g, and the memory to two gig, it dual boots fedora and windows 7 and runs both effectively, though when using nmap the thing can get pretty bogged down, but odds are if I am running a heavy utility like nmap I am not doing anything else.
c|net called the Mini 10 the most popular, customizable netbook on the market when they originally reviewed it late last summer. I now wonder how much they got paid for that review.
As we have seen over the years of tech "popular" doesn't always mean good, and by customizable you can get pretty little cases and what-not.
Having now used one, I am more eager to get a hands-on with an iPad than ever before. It reminds me of the PDA/PalmPilot/Pocket PC craze in the mid/late 90s. Everybody thought that was the future. "The future" lasted less than five years before everybody discovered the Blackberry was the device they never knew they had to have. Netbooks, at least the Mini 10, remind me of those old Pocket PC/Windows CE devices. It's a good idea in theory, but the form factor and ease of use of multi-touch tablets are just going to kill the netbook market.
We shall see, but you're talking about all these PDA's but all that happened was they got integrated with phones and became smart phones. I remember when blackberrys didn't have a native phone function and were purely email devices, and for a long time they were the only device with push email, Windows CE just became windows Mobile, and Apple and Linux got into the market with their own devices. Apple focused on multimedia and worked alongside the music industry with thier DRM, and linux (android) came out with full customization and open development. Those two seem to be running away, leaving Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Palm OS in their dust. Though Blackberry will always have a home in business as long as Microsoft Exchange continues to dominate the market.
Personally, I hope every user who doesn't know how to secure their pc or actually use a pc beyond "Zomg, I want to go on the web and check my email" will go to the ipad, that way we can easily segment the morons from the rest of the users.
