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reddragdivaI want a new netbook — my cheap'n'cheerful Mini 9, having had the crap beaten out of it on a daily basis, is slowly failing in new and exciting ways.
The netbook form factor is perfect for me. But the visible hand of the market means Moore's Law hasn't done its work, so available netbooks are not 4x as fast as 2008, but about 2x for the same price (~£200) and build quality (cheap'n'cheerful).
Does anyone have tips on where I can track down the sort of device that should exist by now?
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(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-04 06:23 pm (UTC)I feel that the netbook form factor is on the way out (if it is even still around) and will be replaced by tablets, at least in the eyes of consumers (as opposed to techies who desire keyboards)
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-04 06:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-05 09:12 am (UTC)IIRC netbooks are still selling well. It's just that the media seem obsessed with ignoring them, and hyping tablets.
(I wonder if in practice, the markets will become a lot more blurred - Windows 8 on tablets, and I've already seen Android on netbooks; touchscreen netbooks becoming more common, and I've already seen tablets with pull out physical keyboards.)
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-04 09:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-04 09:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-04 11:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-05 01:51 am (UTC)As a not entirely relevant note, someone appears to claim have booted Linux on an iPad recently... that's well out of the price range being talked about, and I think that particular thing is an amusing idea rather than a sane thing to do, but anyway. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-05 03:13 am (UTC)GOOG aside, there's also the level of patent risk that seems to be coming up with Android. The revelation that Rubin worked at Apple on some stuff they hold patents for and which has showed up in Android is less than encouraging.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-05 03:19 am (UTC)And yes, Google's attitude to patents has been... naive. On the one hand, I do think that software patents should just be entirely thrown out - the whole thing is ridiculous... but on the other hand, they *do* exist, the legal landscape around patents is actually fairly clear, and to just ignore the risk and claim that whatever you developed is magically non-violating just because you clean-roomed it is... wilful ignorance, at its best construction.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-05 03:30 am (UTC)If you're mostly using a tablet/netbook/whatever to work on remotely stored data then the OS doesn't matter very much. I know
The specific case I'm thinking of is even worse than Google just saying "we clean-roomed it!". It's stuff that came from Rubin, prior to Google buying Android, and which appears to be clearly traceable to his time at Apple. Real bonehead stuff.
And yeah, I don't much like software patents, but they're a fact of life (for now, anyway) and refusing to acknowledge them is really fucking stupid. I don't particularly want to reward Apple for the way they've been using them to beat competitors about the head either though, which doesn't leave a lot of options in the "usefully featureful smartphone/tablet" space.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-05 03:55 am (UTC)You're right that a lot of the tablet people aren't retailing down at really cheapie end, that I have no idea about, but I would guess it's the "new shiny" factor.
Patents: Well, that's the thing - copyright you can get around by clean rooming. With patents it doesn't matter whether you clean room or not - the whole point is that the patent applies to everyone (that has a legal landscape with good support for international IP law). Whether they independently came up with the process or ripped it off is actually completely irrelevant to the question.
On the Apple specific front... err, what do you *expect* them to do? If they didn't do that, they would be being sued into the ground themselves (and frequently are being sued). You can't do *anything* in computers without violating lots of patents - that's the ridiculous part about the whole thing. Perhaps it would be nicer of them if they campaigned harder to ditch the entire system... but that seems unlikely, since they seem to have a much better handle on the system than some of their competitors. Why campaign against guns when your competition appears to prefer to use popguns and water pistols instead of machine guns?
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-05 04:05 am (UTC)But I don't have to like it.
Mostly IT vendors cross-license stuff. This doesn't seem to be happening in this instance, except for Microsoft/APPL and Microsoft/HTC/etc. Not sure what's up with that, whether any of the Android people have tried to do a cross-licensing deal with APPL.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-05 04:16 am (UTC)As far as Android vendors - I'm betting they're not doing a lot of cross-licensing. Android's patent violations are Google's problem, theoretically, not the responsibility of the hardware vendor. Where there are patents that are around a form factor that isn't specified by Android and is the implementation of the vendor, then yes, they should be licensing with APPL themselves. I'd bet that there probably are some - but there's no reporting on such deals, it's a quiet and private contractual money flow between companies, or possibly virtual non-existent money where there are patent cross licensing deals. And of course, theoretical patent issues with Android where the responsibility belongs to Google can still stop the hardware vendor from selling their gear... which some have obviously failed to take into account.
And Google is certainly not playing well with others - the bullshit around the Nortel patent bidding is a clear example of that idiocy. It also took them a *lot* longer to respond to the Lodsys patent trolling, and they've done it in a weird and not very clear way, to boot. Asking the patent office to re-examine a couple of patents, rather than saying "look, we have a license for that patent, it covers Android developers" is (which was the fairly quick Apple response)... well, yeah.
I really am sympathetic to the idea that patents are bullshit and need to be thrown out, but a company like Google just going ahead and acting as if that's the case when it's not is just... well, asking for trouble.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-05 04:50 am (UTC)See the HTC case in the US right now. One of the patents is for making phone numbers/etc in emails/texts "active" links which cause the phone to dial. This is a basic Android feature, not HTC-specific.
The reason APPL are suing HTC rather than GOOG over this is that the process they're using can ban import of goods but not force a payment of damages. So they sue the OEMs through this process to stop the products being imported. No point taking GOOG through this because they don't make anything they can have banned.
They might go for Moto now though.
Chances are that HTC just don't have enough patents to make it worth APPL's while to cross-license. Or maybe APPL don't want to, they'd rather sink the competitors. Can't blame them for that, much.
Look, I don't buy into this popular thing of dismissing Apple as "patent trolls". That's Lodsys and all those guys who do nothing but buy up patents and sue people.
But I'm uneasy about giving Apple more money, and I'm not keen on paying more for Android either. Which really only leaves WP7 right now, and that has all sorts of problems too.
All the options are sub-optimal in way or another.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-05 05:02 am (UTC)I'm mainly comfy with giving money to Apple because that continues to mean their products are targeted at me, the bunny giving them money. If that changes (i.e., they stop targeting their products at me), I'd start to get uncomfy with giving them money pretty fast. :-)
But yes, everything in the space has sucky things about it right now, so it's a question of which kind of sucky do you not care about most.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-05 05:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-05 03:50 am (UTC)I was wondering the same thing
Date: 2011-09-05 11:21 am (UTC)So I went looking for the latest version... And it wasn't significantly better. 2Gb of RAM and Bluetooth were about the only real updates, even the processor is more less the same. I'm guessing the netbooks are what they are and at that price point (bloody cheap) they're unlikely to improve much.
Re: I was wondering the same thing
Date: 2011-09-05 11:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-05 05:52 pm (UTC)I think all the cheep development focus has gone into low-cost tablets lately, and I thought about getting one. Except that all of the ones I have looked at that are priced under 400 US$ or so are crap. I missed the Great HP Clearance of 2011, as well.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-05 06:07 pm (UTC)I'm also annoyed that 9" netbooks have pretty much disappeared. Even a 10" seems unwieldy to me now.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-05 08:12 pm (UTC)I did see there were dual core Atoms available, so I guess that is some progress, though a bit of a shame that the individual cores don't seem to be any faster.
I don't know if they're constrained by trying to keep the Atoms low power? Also I guess even on non-Atom CPUs, some of the improvements are coming by increasing the number of cores, rather than just making them faster.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-06 02:40 am (UTC)(eg. from the Argos clearance store).
Add another gig of ram.
Might be a bit underpowered for what you want, but Atom N450 is fine for general use.