Sucks-Rocks is a neat site which does a basic web search for the term(s) you specify, and tells you if the things people say about it are generally positive (ex. “X rocks”, “X is sweet”) or negative (ex. “X sucks”, “X is lame”).
I was curious on what people thought of Netbooks, since my feeling is that they’re pretty useless.
Interestingly, the search results for “netbook” and “netbooks” are completely different. “Netbook” is highly rated (9.6) and “Netbooks” is not (5.6). I assume this is because when people use the singular form, they’re talking about a Netbook they own (ex. “My netbook rocks”) vs. the plural which is from bloggers like me who’ve never used one (ex. “Netbooks suck”).
That makes me curious as to whether or not people find them useful after buying one. Or alternatively, if the results are being skewed by people who generally commend the thing they’ve dropped a few hundred bucks on so they don’t feel so bad. That phenomenon is part of what makes high-end electronics reviews so hard to interpret. It’s tough for someone who just spend $3k on a plasma TV go online and say the picture is “just ok.”
My netbook rocks!!!!
Seriously though, I went back and forth on whether I wanted one because it looked shiny and gadgety or whether I’d really get my money’s worth. I ended up buying a Samsung NC 10, and while I’ve only had it about a month I’ve been pretty happy with it. I didn’t spend 3k on it, so I don’t feel the need to justify that, but it’s certainly not perfect.
But I travel a lot including 40 minutes on a tram to work daily, multiple train trips each week and lots of flights. I was getting pretty sick of bringing around my huge dev laptops (my smallest laptop was my 15″ MBP), especially when I didn’t need that kind of power and knew the battery would only last maybe two hours.
The netbook is great. It fits in my purse, is incredibly light, has a battery life of > 7 hours, has a 160 GB hard drive, and is enough to catch up on e-mail, blogs, Twitter and my 8 million social networks, write articles, surf the web, work on slides, etc. Am I writing code on it? No. I could debug javascript in IE I guess. Maybe I’ll put another gig of memory in it and install Visual Studio but it would probably just be annoying because the screen is so small. Honestly I don’t need it to write code. I just need it to help me keep up with other stuff. And it does that really well.
My nine cents.
I just re-read that.
I totally sound like I’m trying desperately to justify it.
Damn recession.
It sounds a lot more convenient once you start with the premise that you already carry a purse around.
I use the iPhone to handle most of those scenarios, but the battery life issue is pretty serious (although, there are external iphone battery packs that bump the life up quite a bit, which I bring on longer trips).