Though both “nerdboys” have been out of school for quite some time we still marvel at “back to school” sales. Back in the day of course, “back to school sale” meant purely new pens, pencils and binders. (Back in the day, we also had to walk 5 miles to school, uphill both ways….)
Seriously, these days, student life has become much more digitized: Netbooks, iPods, even graphical calculators have radically changed the way a typical student functions.
Great value
What is great for the student can also mean great value for the IT professional. As with most products, hitting a critical mass helps to drive prices lower and often increases the value for the consumer.
Netbooks have become the latest craze in this ever changing digital world. With the advent of faster Internet connections and cloud applications, these sub notebooks help meet the needs of people who want something portable, is reasonably powerful, but are unwilling to pay the price for a full notebook. In our opinion, netbooks can offer great value as they often do what most mainstream notebooks even a few years ago did at the fraction of the price.
Why we’re interested
Specifically for us, we thought this “bang for buck” ratio was quite intriguing. At the same time, we were both interested in finding an enabling technology to help us be more efficient at blogging on this site.
What we looked for
Both of us wanted something portable yet reasonably powerful: light enough that we could carry around everywhere and functional enough to be able to blog, check email, and play the occasional video or two. For Joe, battery life was particularly important. For Jonathan, price was key.
We had quite the heated debates as to which netbook was the better model, but in the end (with the benefit of hindsight) it seems each of us got the netbook that best suited his/her requirements.
Joe got the Samsung NC10 with a 6 cell battery for long sessions, and I (Jonathan) got the hugely popular Acer Aspire One AOD250 model – chosen mainly because of its incredible price and light weight.
Stay tuned!
Over the next few weeks we’ll be giving you some first impressions and possibly some full on reviews of each machine.
