Eight Netbooks Compared

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8 Netbooks for Education to consider
March 8, 2009 by Mike Herrity · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Netbooks

As we are on the topic of netbooks at the moment I thought I would share some quick research I did this week. I have been looking at a suitable product for our students to use in mobile classrooms around the site. If you remember I set out a list of basic specs at the beginning of the year which I thought were essential for a netbook before we consider a significant purchase. These were a minimum 10 inch screen, 1GB ram and a good sized solid state drive. With these three basic criteria the SSD is the only area which will take more time to become standard and is taking longer than I imagined to become mainstream. Clearly processing and graphics are key development factors but it is not yet possible to put some specific requirements on this area, only to note that things will and need to improve.

With all this in mind I have identified 8 netbooks to show you today if you are in a similar position and looking at a significant purchase for your school. This is not a review but more a list to identify from and a means to keep up with current prices which I will show in $ and also £ where possible. I am using Amazon to show the price as my initial benchmark price of $650 came from Amazon in August when the Asus 1000H was launched. The only major machine I am missing in the 10 inch category that I know about is the Dell Mini 10.

8 Comparable Netbooks to consider for use in education
Acer Aspire One AOD150-1165 10.1-Inch Netbook - $349.99


ARCHOS 10 10.2-Inch Netbook - $349.99




ASUS Eee PC 1000HA 10-Inch Netbook $349.99 (£314)


HP Mini 1035NR 10.2-Inch Netbook $399.99


Lenovo Ideapad S10 10.2-Inch Netbook $349.99
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MSI Wind U120-024US 10-Inch Netbook £329.99


Samsung NC10 10.2-inch Netbook $435 (£352)


Sylvania GNET31201XS 10-Inch Magni Elite Slate G-Netbook $349.99





The first observation is that the machines are almost all identically priced at $349.99. MSI Wind might be the company driving price down at the moment with HP and especially Samsung perhaps trying to differentiate themselves on build quality. The machines have almost all the same specifications with the exception of Archos having a 3 cell battery and HP only a 60GB hard drive compared to 160GB in all the other devices. Also interesting to note that on Amazon UK only 2 of the 8 machines are available for sale!

It will be interesting to see how far (if at all) price falls in the next year and what improvement in specification we will see. Two major changes are already evident in the market with Asus bring out a 1000HE containing the Intel Atom N280 processor and Samsung moving up to 12 inch screens with the NC20. This move is also interesting as Samsung have switched to VIA for their processor instead of Intel. I will run an update of this post in 3 months and we can see what the market looks like then