Quote:
Originally Posted by ericinboston
First, go down to 1-2 stores and touch the various netbooks...bring a pen and paper and jot down which ones have poor keyboards and/or are too heavy. Believe it or not, all these sub 3lb netbooks are extremely light. You're not going to be able to tell the difference between a 2.8 and 2.6lb netbook. I wouldn't stress over that.
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I agree. We can recommend 40 different netbook models but it won't do any good if you don't like they keyboard, weight, screen resolution, the stores don't have them in stock, and the stores are pricing them too high. Looking at U.S. prices and simply doing a conversion to Australian dollars won't work as it doesn't account for most aspects that cause store pricing.
Feel free to take a pen and paper along with a digital camera (if you felt the need to take pictures) with you to the stores. You can then come back here and ask questions regarding the different netbook models and read through all the reviews. You aren't going to have trouble with any netbook when it comes to light photo editing. There are online "lite" Photoshop-type apps that are free to use. I forget what they are called but they are out there and work right through Internet Explorer/FireFox. Ditto same goes for Microsoft Office 2007. Netbooks these days can run that without a hitch as Office isn't a resource intensive series of programs. I even have the beta version of Office 2010 up and running on my netbook too. The advanced animations and themes in PowerPoint run just fine.
As Eric said, you really only have to worry about specs when it comes to video playback (this includes online Flash video playback). There are netbooks that are designed for video playback. Pretty much any netbook out there can effectively handle standard definition (SD) video playback (though they will struggle with Flash video playback, this includes sites such as YouTube and Hulu). However, many netbooks now come with the appropriate hardware for high definition (HD) video playback. They can handle 1080p videos without a hitch. The benefit these netbooks have is that Adobe is supporting the hardware for Flash playback. This means that the netbook will no longer struggle when opening a standard YouTube or Hulu video. It also means that YouTube HD videos are beginning to playback quite nicely. Flash 10.1 adds this hardware support and it is still in a non-final press release. There will be a second version of this press release containing performance updates this month while a final version should be around in the summer.
So you need to judge how important video playback is. Most netbooks can playback SD content including videos purchased from the iTunes Store. Factor in Flash and HD video playback and the whole thing becomes different. Go down to your store and let us know which models you liked that fell within your price budget.