Netbook purchase is go!

I offhandedly mentioned my future netbook purchase in the blog last week. I've since had people ask me, "WTF is a netbook?" Lemme 'splain...and tell you why I'm getting the one I'm getting.

A netbook is a smaller, lightweight, cheaper laptop. Basically, it's a laptop designed for note-taking and web-surfing; it's NOT meant to be something you can do extensive amounts of work on or install a lot of applications on. But it's perfect for tossing in a bag and bringing to conferences.

To decide which one to get, I looked very intently at the various netbook reviews on CNET. There are so many tradeoffs between a netbook and a standard PC, you basically have to decide which drawbacks will annoy you the most and which will annoy you the least, and then try to find a machine that ably compromises those things.

In my case, I decided the things that would annoy me the quickest if they weren't up to snuff were battery life and keyboard size. Your average netbook is going to have pretty poor battery life (just a few hours' worth), and its keyboard will be much different from a laptop keyboard both in key size and placement (some people describe the keys as "Chicklet-sized"). When I compared the various netbooks, I found that the Dell Mini 9 scored pretty well in terms of keyboard usability and battery life.

Additionally, I considered the hard drive type. Some netbooks come with an optical drive, which is less friendly if you're going to be tossing the laptop around (though they give you much more storage space for less money), while others - including the one I'm getting - offer a "solid state" drive, which survives bumps much better.

I also found out that the Dell comes with Ubuntu (a version of Linux), which means the operating system will take less hard drive space and memory to run than Windows.

One final consideration: it took some digging but I did finally determine that Adobe Air will run on Ubuntu. That's good news, since I definitely want to run Tweetdeck and possibly Digsby on the system so I can keep up with Twitter and instant messaging.

So after all that, I decided that the Dell Mini 9 was the right one for me.

Have you considered buying a netbook? What features were most important to you?

(Photo from Dell.com)