| I'll echo most everyone else - a netbook, for development, is not an ideal choice. However, there are advantages - very portable, ridiculous battery life. My main choice (and the one I ended up buying) was the Asus 1005PR : http://commercial.asus.com/product/detail/69 Here are the reasons:
1. Ultraportable. 10" screen means it fits anyway, and is light enough to carry around by hand. It's lightweight and comes with the standard EEEpc addons, making the boot-up time, especially to the mini-os, very good. This means quick note-taking and response if you think of something cool on the fly. 2. Absurd battery life - sometimes you don't want to drag around the power cable. Sure, 6 hours is enough for most people, but in honestly most other netbooks I've tried only hit 3-4 hours. I can easily crank out 6-7 in a single Starbucks dev session. This netbook will get you there, and the bus/train ride home. 3. Adequate screen size - Sure, it's 10", but its got a 1366x768 screen. Vertical space is an issue, but horizontal is very good - widescreen makes it pretty sexy for Ubuntu Unity (though I don't really like Unity). I will say that it 100% better than a 1024x600. 4. Fast - a Broadcom chip means you've got 720p on youtube with no hiccups. 2gb of ram with a decent Pinetrail processor. Not ridiculously fast, but with any netbook you're really not going to get more than 2Gb and a decent processor, but this does do the video part at least. Slap on a 64GB solid-state and you're flying. 5. Cheap? Really, all netbooks are cheap. This is towards the upper spectrum. 6. It fits the bill - it fits the specs you posted. It's not underpowered, and it's extremely portable and fast (bootup especially). Good for monitoring uptime/fixing quick bugs/ developing for long periods of time (with proper adjustments to your dev environment). Hope this helps! |