Archive for May, 2009

Having played with UMPCs for quite some time, I realized that there is definitely a direct relationship between how small a gadget can be versus how useable it actually is.  As a “geek” we all want our gadgets to be as small as possible, but when a gadget is no longer efficient…we have issues.

Out goes the UMPC and in comes the Netbooks!  UMPCs were great in concept, however, most of the screen sizes were below 9 inches and they were significantly underpowered and often very expensive.  Netbooks on the other hand offer screen sizes at 9 inch+ with decent performance and are often priced below $500 USD. 

For my eyes, I believe a 10 inch screen is the limit on how much screen real estate I need in order to be productive.  Anything smaller is unusable to me as there is just too much scrolling or I need to squint in order to read perfectly.  When you have a screen size around 10 inches, the keyboard and mouse pad is actually very useable as well.  With the UMPCs I often found that I had to use my Bluetooth keyboard for me to be able to type efficiently. 

The performance on the larger Netbooks might not be earth shattering, but coupled with the fact that you can have a larger battery, faster hard disk, and is generally $100’s cheaper than a UMPC, it’s quite hard not to like it.  For day to day tasks I have no problem using my Samsung NC10.  The battery life is so amazing that I can watch 6 hours of movies/shows on an air plane and still have enough juice for when I touch down for GPS navigation if I need it.

I’ll do a full review of the Samsung NC10 at a later date.  I loved it so much that I sold off both the Fujitsu U810 and a MacBook Air for it…