Netbooks - What the hell are they? Should you get one?

Netbooks are popping up everywhere … even onboard yachts. Well believe it or not most things that pop up elsewhere in the world do pop up on yachts.

Netbooks can be slightly lesser powered than their more expensive full laptop counterparts, so my recomendation is to try them out HARD. Run what you really want to run, or simulate it as much as possible, before you take the plunge. Many of them run Intel Atom or similar CPU’s, and Intel Atom even has Dual-Core versions out. But be careful because I have seen some of them perform rather slowly… You might check this out:

http://analytics.informationweek.com/abstract/18/1433/Mobile-Wireless/informed-cio-netbooks.html

Informed CIO: Netbooks
 
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The New Option: Netbooks
Challenge Notebooks’ Dominance

We’ve seen laptop alternatives before—bricks, iPAQs, smart pads and “ultra portables” that were never quite cheap or convenient enough to take a real bite out of the market. What’s different about netbooks? Simple: They’re really, really inexpensive and provide better functionality than any smartphone. We’re not surprised that consumers and business users alike are snapping these babies up like Twitter stock options.

Still, some CIOs wonder whether netbooks are ultimately a consumer play. The answer is unquestionably no. In our recent InformationWeek Analytics Windows 7 survey of 1,414 business technology professionals, 36% of respondents said they already have some level of netbook use in their organizations today. This saturation is expected to grow to 72% of companies over the next 24 months, with 19% planning extensive deployments.

While you can’t ignore the category, CIOs do need to educate themselves on what netbooks are capable of today and how the landscape of competitors, hardware options and OS choices will dramatically change over the coming two years. In this report, we’ll outline 10 key questions you need to review to see where netbooks fit within your organization.

Table of Contents
3 Author’s Bio
4 Little Device, Big Impact
4 Figure 1: Current and Future Netbook Use
6 Figure 2: Typical Device Configurations
7 Figure 3: 2009 Consumer Reports Usability Scores For Laptops and Notebooks
9 Figure 4: Impact of Vista and XP Use on System Policies
12 Figure 5: VDC: Netbook Unit Shipments Through 2013

10 Questions to Ask:
5 1 | Does everyone understand what a netbook is—and is not?
7 2 | Have we mapped our employees’ computing behavior?
8 3 | Can they play a role in our cloud and virtualization strategy?
8 4 | What’s our current plan for mobile phones?
9 5 | How are we going to manage them?
10 6 | How is our green policy shaping up this year?
11 7 | How open are you to Microsoft alternatives?
12 8 | How open are we to Intel alternatives?
13 9 | How will our organization account for these devices?
14 10 | Are netbooks just a fluke?

* Now you probably don’t need all of the information in there, but it might be an interesting one to browse. If you’re on a yacht and need information *like* this contact me and I’ll hook you up.

—

Alan Spicer Marine Telecom

This entry was posted on 6. January 2010 at 08:38 and is filed under General Computer onboard Sail and Motor Yachts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.