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What It Is: Netbooks have hit a nerve. According to DisplaySearch’s forecast, sales for these small, low-cost notebooks will rise 65 percent in 2009, compared to just a 3 percent growth for standard notebooks. The form factor is attractive. For example, the HP Mini 2140 costs just US$500, sports the low-power Intel Atom processor, has a battery life of six hours and weighs just three pounds.

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How to Choose: Netbook Vs. Ultraportable Laptop

Why The Hype: Netbooks meet a need. Smartphones, such as the Apple iPhone, are intended for what DisplaySearch analyst John Jacobs calls a three-minute experience–enough time to check e-mail or call the office. A notebook is for longer sessions, maybe three hours. A netbook fits in between. It’s designed for a 30-minute experience including Web access, e-mail and document editing. Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research, says netbooks are travel-friendly, fit well with enterprise hot-swap repair procedures (since they are easy to manage) and thus can work for both IT managers and mobile professionals such as sales agents.

The Real Deal: Netbooks seem viable. JeffreyBreen,the CTO at Yankee Group, tells of an employee who bought his own netbook and found it worked well for quick Web and e-mail sessions. Yet, if there was a jury for enterprise decisions, they would still be deliberating netbook value. Gottheil notes that more robust e-mail products, such as Outlook or Notes, run best on a dual-core processor. In a mass deployment of netbooks, an enterprise might have to add more wireless access points or change wireless configurations to avoid interference issues, which add to the cost. “Netbooks may be an optional [device] in enterprise environments in the future,” says Thomas Endres, CIO with Lufthansa. But right now, they’re not fit for engineering and other complex applications.

Bob Hersch, the global managing director of the workplace technology and collaboration practice at Accenture, thinks netbooks work well for consumers of information but not creators of information.

The company, with 180,000 knowledge workers across the globe, has given a solid “it depends” answer on netbooks. Hersch says it is important to match the needs of the end user to the device. In many ways, that’s even the consensus among netbook manufacturers. Lenovo, which makes the IdeaPad S10, markets the netbook as an accessory.

Should You Invest? In an enterprise environment–where standardization is key and superfluous accessories are verboten–the netbook is a hard sell. It’s another form factor for IT to support, and the more limited processor is not a good fit for anyone who creates information–say, in an Excel spreadsheet. Interestingly, netbooks–and related nettops (for example, thin desktops)–may become a good option for thin computing after the hype of massive consumer interest subsides. According to Jacobs, the sub-$500 price point is also attractive as a quick replacement unit in the enterprise–a Hyundai loaner while your Audi gets repaired.

John Brandon is a Minnesota-based freelance writer

In an attempt to upset the netbook applecart, Lenovo on Monday planned to introduced a small and affordable laptop that can deliver full PC functionality without compromising features.

The IdeaPad U350 is the first in Lenovo’s new line of inexpensive ultraportable laptops, which will include low-power processors Intel has designed for small and affordable laptops. The laptops will be as light as netbooks but include larger screens and offer more functionality.(See our hands-on report on the IdeaPad S12)

Priced starting at US$649, the U350 weighs about 3.5 pounds and includes a 13.3-inch screen. It comes with a four-cell battery that can run for around four hours. Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system comes pre-loaded with the laptop, and Lenovo officials declined comment on potential upgrade options to Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 7 OS.

The laptop is powered by Intel’s single-core Intel Pentium SU2700 processor, which runs at 1.3GHz and includes 2MB of cache. Lenovo will start offering Intel’s faster single-core SU3500 Core Solo processor as an option with the laptop starting in August. The U350 comes with 2GB of RAM and can support up to a 500GB hard drive. The Intel chips carry the CULV moniker, which stands for consumer ultra-low voltage chips.

The U350 offers more features and functionality than netbooks, said Charles Farmer, consumer products marketing manager at Lenovo. Netbooks are designed to be secondary PCs, while the U350 is being targeted as a primary PC for users.

Netbooks are designed for basic tasks like Web surfing, and have small screens of up to 12 inches. The U350 has a larger screen and includes graphics capabilities usually found in a mainstream laptop, Farmer said. The U350 can run high-definition multimedia, gaming and resource-hungry applications, something netbooks typically can’t do.

The U350 also supports more memory and storage than netbooks, Farmer said.

By the same token, the U350 is not as powerful as expensive ultraportables like Lenovo’s ThinkPad X200 and X300 series laptops. The ThinkPads run faster processors like Intel’s dual-core Core 2 Duo chips, and include other bells and whistles like fingerprint readers and solid-state drives for data storage. However, the U350 is much cheaper in price, Farmer said.

The U350 will start shipping by the end of June. It will be available worldwide

Taiwanese Linux distributor Linpus Technologies plans to make a version of Moblin 2.0 available for download next week, a move timed to coincide with the annual Computex hardware exhibition in Taipei.

Linpus will show off a new version of its Linpus Linux Lite distribution based on Moblin 2.0 for the first time, including versions based on user interfaces designed by Linpus and Intel, the company said in a notice posted on its Web site.

Linpus Linux Lite will be one of the first distributions based on Moblin 2.0 to be released, it said.

Beta source code for Moblin 2.0 was released earlier this month and the new version of the operating system is tweaked to run on small, low-cost laptops called netbooks as well as handheld computers. Among the features offered with the operating system are the ability to boot up quickly and an improved user interface that allows users to easily update their status on a range of social networking sites, like Facebook.

The earlier version of Linpus Linux Lite was used with some versions of Acer’s popular Acer Aspire One netbook.

Moblin started as an effort by Intel to develop a version of Linux for handheld computers it calls MIDs, or mobile Internet devices. The devices have been slow to catch on with users, in part because hardware makers didn’t have access to a good operating system customized for small screens and a touch-based interface.

In April, the Linux Foundation took over the project but Intel remains closely tied to it, holding one of four spots on the Moblin steering committee

An anti-microbial keyboard and a “network activity light” to let teachers know when students are surfing the Web instead of paying attention to their lessons are among the features of a netbook aimed at schools unveiled Tuesday by Dell.

The germ-killing keyboard on the Dell Latitude 2100 is coated with a naturally-occurring silver material, according to David Lord, senior manager for product marketing in Dell’s business client division. It is a $20 add-on option to the Latitude 2100, which starts at $369.

Other features of the Latitude 2100 include a rubberized case to help protect against bumps and drops, and a carrying handle designed for smaller hands.

The netbook is based around Intel Corp.’s popular Atom N270 1.6-GHz CPU.

The $369 version weighs 2.9 pounds and runs Ubuntu Linux 8.1 on an 8-GB solid-state disk (SSD) drive with a three-cell battery that lasts 3.5 hours, said Lord.

The price goes to $500 for a fully-loaded version with Vista Home Basic, a 160-GB conventional hard drive, anti-microbial keyboard, touchscreen and six-cell battery for up to seven hours of battery life.

Dell already produced a line of consumer netbooks under the Inspiron Mini brand.

The Latitude 2100 “is an entirely new platform,” said Patrick Burns, senior manager for product marketing at Dell. “It is not a rebranded Dell Mini.”

Dell said the Latitude 2100 could prove useful to some companies, too. Lord said that enterprises are “gravitating to the form factor,” but he declined to comment on whether and when Dell would unveil a true business-oriented netbook, something rival Hewlett-Packard Co. did with its Mini 2140.

The Dell netbooks come in five colors with students in mind: blue, red, green, yellow and black. That, said Burns, can help for identification purposes in schools, i.e. yellow for third-graders, blue for fifth-graders.

Dell is also offering a locking, moveable cart for storing the netbooks securely in classrooms after hours. The $3,900 cart comes with a router and power to recharge the netbooks.

Sales of PCs and other electronics in minor Chinese cities grew in the first quarter on the back of a rebate program for residents of remote areas, a research firm said Monday.

But how much the 13 percent rebate plan has boosted demand remained unclear as China moved to simplify the bureaucracy-laden scheme, which it launched in February to speed recovery from the economic downturn.

The rebates helped push consumer electronics sales outside of China’s major cities and provincial capitals up to 4 billion yuan (US$586.8 million) in the first quarter, a 72 percent rise from a year earlier, according to Wedge MKI.

Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo PCs in the scheme benefited, along with LCD TVs, and both laptop and desktop computers saw higher demand, according to the firm.

But analysts warned against expecting too much from the scheme, which also includes utilities like washing machines. Bigger moves are needed to solve the long-standing problem of low consumer demand in China, said economist Andy Xie.

Beijing has focused its efforts to revive the economy on increasing loans to manufacturers rather than addressing low household incomes, Xie said.

“China’s demand cannot be sustained by this kind of subsidy,” said Xie.

A public complaint section on the rebate plan’s official Web site revealed frustration among users whose rebates were late or whose local officials were unfamiliar with the plan’s rules. Some buyers said vendors charged fees beyond those mandated for laptops or TVs in the scheme.

China’s finance ministry responded with changes to the scheme last week. Vendors rather than finance ministry outposts can now approve rebates, and in extremely rural areas vendors can also issue the money. Buyers elsewhere must still redeem rebates through a government agency.

In an effort to counter the growing dominance of Microsoft’s Windows OS in netbooks, Intel on Tuesday announced a beta version of a Linux OS it has developed for low-cost laptops and mobile devices.

The chip company on Tuesday announced a beta of Moblin 2.0, a stripped-down distribution of Linux optimized for smaller screens on netbooks and mobile Internet devices (MIDs). Intel has fine-tuned Moblin for netbooks based on Atom chips with a simple user interface and improved power-saving features.

Most netbooks today ship with Intel’s Atom chip but run the Windows XP operating system, which Microsoft ships for low-cost laptops. But Intel wants to ensure that every “ounce” of technology — including Moblin — put into Atom is optimized for size and power consumption, said Doug Fisher, vice president and general manager of the software and services group at Intel, during a conference call on Tuesday.

Netbooks are low-cost laptops characterized by small screens and limited graphics capabilities. The laptops are designed for basic purposes such as Web surfing, e-mail and word processing. Shipments of netbooks grew sevenfold in the first quarter of 2009 to reach around 4.5 million, with the number expected to reach 22 million by the end of the year, according to IDC.

Intel has contributed a new user interface to the beta, which is optimized for the smaller screens of Atom-based netbooks and MIDs. The new UI aggregates social networks under a single interface, which should make interacting with friends easier, Fisher said. Moblin also includes features that take advantage Atom’s sleep state to extend battery life of netbooks, Fisher said.

The beta release comes ahead of Microsoft’s planned release of its next-generation Windows 7 operating system, which will include a version optimized for netbooks. However, Fisher said that Moblin was not designed to compete with Windows. Both offer unique user experiences, and there are no points of comparison, he said.

“It depends on the user experience the [PC maker] tries to put in the [netbook],” Fisher said. Moblin is being designed as a slim version of Linux optimized for size and power that can boot up within five seconds, he said. That is much quicker than Windows XP, which is a full-featured operating system that in some cases could take up to one minute to load.

However, the Intel officials seemed to recognize Windows as the dominant OS and were willing to concede that the popularity of Windows XP might carry over with Windows 7.

“Windows 7 is a good choice and our customers will use that too,” said Noury Al-Khaledy, general manager for netbooks and nettops at Intel, during the conference call.

Netbook users are familiar with Windows environments and may feel uncomfortable moving to a Linux distribution, said Jay Chou, research analyst at IDC. Netbooks started off as devices to run basic applications, but consumers today want to do more, like run more powerful applications or play games, Chou said.

“Client-side Linux is a tough nut to crack,” Chou said. Limiting features in the Linux OS or giving users the inability to install more applications may limit capabilities of devices, Chou said.

Development of the Moblin OS was initiated by Intel in 2007 and was last month handed over to the nonprofit Linux Foundation, though Intel continues to contribute to the efforts.

The beta version of the Moblin OS is available on Moblin’s Web site.

A number of operating systems designed for netbooks are available, including GoodOS’s gOS3 Gadgets and Canonical’s Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which was launched late last month. Built on the Ubuntu 9.04 Linux core and mostly known by its Jaunty Jackalope moniker, Netbook Remix builds applications into a one-touch interface and uses fewer software resources to save battery life. The OS has received positive reviews from Linux enthusiasts.

A prototype device due to be shown in Tokyo Wednesday may give laptop computers a better shot at performing heavy-duty video processing.

Space and heat considerations often limit the amount of computing power that can be packed into laptops. But Taiwan’s Leadtek plans to unveil a prototype external video processor that brings the power of Toshiba’s SpursEngine chip to portable platforms.

The SpursEngine was developed by Toshiba and is based on the same architecture as the Cell Broadband Engine microprocessor that powers the PlayStation 3 console. While the Cell contains a Power PC core and eight “Synergistic Processing Elements” cores, the SpursEngine contains only four of the SPE cores.

The chip also contains a hardware encoder and decoder for MPEG2 and MPEG4 AVC/H.264 video and is designed to be used as a PC co-processor handling of calculation-intensive work such a real-time high-definition graphics processing.

Leadtek already offers a plug-in SpursEngine board for desktop PCs and the prototype device essentially packages the board in a case with PCI Express connector for use with laptops.

The device will be on show at the Embedded Systems Expo that runs from Wednesday to Friday. Leadtek hasn’t detailed when it will be available or a likely price but the PC Card costs about ¥29,800 (US$308).

Lenovo on Monday updated its IdeaPad S10 netbook, making it thinner and lighter, with a larger keyboard and touchpad in an attempt to make it easier to use.

The IdeaPad S10-2 netbook will also come with built-in 3G (third-generation) mobile broadband as an option, the company said.

The netbook’s keyboard has been increased to nearly 90 percent the size of a standard laptop keyboard, which should give users the familiar feel of a fully functional laptop, Lenovo said. The netbook’s weight, size and estimated battery life were not immediately available.

The S10-2 includes a 10.1-inch screen and will be available worldwide by the end of May starting at US$349. It will be powered by an Intel-based Atom N270 processor and will come with the Windows XP OS. It will support up to 1GB of RAM and up to 160GB of hard-drive storage. It will be available in designs of black, white, grey and pink. Integrated 3G will be offered in a few months, the company said.

The redesign is an attempt by Lenovo to iron out kinks in its netbook products as the category evolves. Netbooks are low-priced laptops designed for applications like Web surfing and basic word processing, but it have been criticized for limited hardware. An Apple official late last month trashed netbooks for having cramped keyboards and junky hardware.

Despite the obvious shortcomings of netbooks, low prices have fueled demand for them. IDC earlier this month said worldwide netbook shipments went up sevenfold to roughly 4.5 million during the first quarter of 2009 compared to the same quarter last year. It comprised approximately 8 percent of all PC shipments during the first quarter. Netbook shipments are expected to reach 22 million this year.

Lenovo was the fourth largest netbook vendor during the first quarter behind Acer, Asus and Hewlett-Packard, according to IDC.

Some of us take out second mortgages to make ends meet. Some of us toil away at menial jobs to weather the economic crisis. Others stab their US$1,800 MacBook Air with a kitchen knife because it has a broken hinge. Who are we to say what’s right and wrong?

According to the resourceful genius in this video, he, as well as six of his friends who also own MacBook Airs, have all experienced issues with a broken hinge that attaches the monitor to the body. This defect also apparently gives one a bloodthirsty urge to repeatedly stab their MacBook Air in the display with a kitchen knife. On camera.

To add insult to injury, he recommends that we buy a Lenovo x300 laptop instead of a Mac. Uh huh. We have one question to ask: is it kitchen knife-proof?

I’m personally surprised it took three stabs to crack the screen. That’s gotta be some sort of testament to Apple’s build quality, right? And amazingly the MacBook didn’t explode in his face, electrocute him, or shoot hazardous LCD goo into his eyes. Well, it would have made for a more interesting video, anyway

If you’re planning an exhibition to conquer Mount Everest, you need to make sure you have all have of the necessary supplies. If you’re list of supplies is anything like the most recent group to take on the Everest challenge, you should pack your MacBook Pro and a few iPods, too.

On the First Ascent Web site, Gerry Moffat, head of production for the team, films daily dispatches and uses his MacBook Pro to transfer and edit the data. All of the footage is shot on a solid state cards on the mountain.

“It’s then put into the trusty MacBook Pro,” Moffat said in a video on the Web site. “These have been functioning superbly all the way up — we’re at about 21,000 feet.”

After the footage has been backed up, the card goes to one of the sherpas who takes it to the base camp for editing. The video editor, Tom, then makes another backup of the data and begins editing the footage for public viewing.

The relevant clips are imported into Final Cut Pro, Apple’s professional video application. Music is added, the video is edited and the dispatch is ready to be encoded for the Internet. The files are uploaded via satellite connection to an FTP server in the U.S. and posted to the Internet.

Documenting the journey is not the only reason to carry Apple gear on Everest. Each climber has an entertainment pack that they carry for rest periods. Many of them chose to bring their iPods.

During a rest day, some of the climbers give us a glimpse of what they take with them to pass the time.

“This is what’s turing out to be the best entertainment on this trip — my iPod touch,” one of the climbers said.

“Of course, I’ve always got my trusty [iPod] shuffle,” said another climber when he was going over his entertainment kit.

One of the other climbers brought her iPod nano on the trip to sit back and rest with.

The team is scheduled to make the ascent to the peak of Mount Everest Friday. You can view all of the video dispatches on the First Ascent Web site.