The best possible notebook isn’t necessarily the one with the most power, the one with the biggest and brightest screen or the one with the biggest sticker price. The best possible notebook is the one that does exactly what you need it to do, that’s always with you and that finds the perfect balance of price and performance, considering your needs.

If, like many people, your needs when away from your desk are fairly minimal, confined mostly to word processing, email, Internet and light multimedia, the perfect notebook to meet your needs may be part of a fairly new category, loosely called “netbooks.”

Far from the loaded gaming laptops from the likes of Alienware, Voodoo and others that pack in performance to spare with a pricetag to match, netbooks are small form factor PCs that keep the system specs down and have a tempting sticker price to show for the sacrifice. It is a category popularized by ASUS with its revolutionary Eee PC, an inexpensive notebook not much bigger than a DVD case and a few times as thick. Running a specially designed Linux distro, the Eee PC is the benchmark by which early competitive entries into the category are judged.

A $500 pricetag seems to be the netbook sweetspot, and it’s a price manufacturers strive to meet or beat. It’s the tipping point at which a netbook represents good value; anything more than that and you might as well move up to a fully featured laptop with an optical drive, more memory, faster chip and a larger, often brighter screen.

The New York Times recently reported that major PC manufacturers are hesitant to enter the space because the margins on netbooks are so low. That hasn’t stopped some major players — Acer for example, with a Dell netbook apparently also nearing launch, and Toshiba and other majors dabbling in the market away from North American shores — from jumping in to the fray.

Alongside the usual race to the top — notebooks packing in as many high-end features as is humanly possible — there’s a race to the bottom. This race sees manufacturers creating notebooks that have just enough power to do the things most users need to do in a small and infinitely portable package, inexpensive enough that users might consider it as a supplemental laptop, a kid’s notebook or even a tech toy.

We had an opportunity to check out a few of the major entries in the netbook category. While head-to-head comparisons via benchmarking is out of the question given that these diminutive PCs run different operating systems, there are some significant usability differences we can comment on.

Next: HP 2133 Mini-Note PC

Pages: 1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5 · 6