Bigger is not necessarily better- not when it comes to gadgets anyway. Mini laptops (or netbooks), as well as tablets are meant to offer the best experience possible, while occupying as little space as possible in your bag or on your desk.
Of course, considering that netbooks need to have a keyboard, they can’t be as small as a smart phone (although that type of weird hybrid appeared on the market a while back).
Most netbooks are in the 10 inch realm, with some overweight/oversize 11 to 12 inch machines offering a much better experience in terms of performance if you’re willing to carry around the extra load and pay more from the get go. Our focus in this article is on the smallest netbooks you can find right now and there are surely a couple of decent alternatives around.
The smallest netbooks you’ll find come mainly from Asus and have a 7 inch screen. These were the first netbooks to formally come out under this monicker a couple of years ago, but they were pushed aside quite fast by 10 inchers. The EEE PC 700 and the 7 inchers to follow had modest hardware and a cramped keyboard, offering a rather unequal experience throughout.
These days, going for one of these netbooks is not really recommended, as you couldn’t even run Windows 7 properly on these machines. Also, the small 4 GB SSD wouldn’t offer enough flexibility when it comes to storing data and you would be forced to go for a cloud oriented OS like MeeGo in order to get something out of it.
Asus Eee PC 700 and 900 were pioneers of the niche and now they fit better in a museum
If you’re willing to spend a little extra, you can go for a Vaio P netbook, which has a decent screen, even if only 8 inches in diagonal, better Atom processor and solid state drive up to 128 GB. As for 10 inch netbooks, there are many entries that value mobility and physical characteristics more than performance.
Acer came up with a line of netbooks that feature great size/weight ratios, although the internals are not really impressive.The AO 522 is only 1.25 kg heavy and is fairly slim, being very easy to carry around with one hand. Still, don’t expect to turn the world upside down with it, as the N450 single core processor and 1 GB of RAM can only take you so far as light browsing, some text editing and modest video/audio playback- of course, preferably not all at once.
The AOD 255 packs a very similar hardware lineup and a matte 1024 x 600 display, as well as a very decent keyboard. It’s just a little heavier, ticking in at 1.40 kg, and it comes with a 3 cell battery that can take you through 4 hours of work.
Acer Aspire One D255
Actually, most lightweight netbooks out there come with 3 cell batteries, which offer a maximum of 3 to 5 hours of autonomy, but only if you keep the screen brightness down and don’t abuse video playback or other resource intensive apps. A better pick from Acer is the AOD 257, which has the same slim chassis, but packs a dual core processor that’s able to offer a much better experience and multitasking.
We couldn’t leave Asus out of this, of course. Their recently launched X101 is probably the slimmest netbook out there right now. It’s 0.69 inches thin and weighs about 1 kg, being a great choice if you need a lightweight netbook.
The X101 goes for only $199 online right now and packs a single core N435 Atom chip, 1 GB of RAM, a 3 cell battery and runs on MeeGo, which keeps all your data online- that’s why the netbook comes with a small, 8 GB SSD, that helps keeping the price down.
Asus Eee PC X101 has a design inspired by feathers
As for the future, Asus will release in late Fall a couple of ultra slim netbooks, named Asus 1025C/E, which will run on Cedar Trail chips, that can accommodate fanless platforms and SSD drives, which will make the netbooks smaller and lighter. Also, it’s good to know that this new line won’t be too expensive, as the base price will be around $250.
