This is an important pic for 2 reasons: a) it’s my second new toy this week and b) it was taken on my iphone. Yep, i succumbed to the temptation and got myself a netbook. It was basically as simple as Car emailing me a Tigerdirect link and me saying go ahead. MSI Winds had been leading contenders in any case. I didn’t end up getting the u120 at the end, I got the u100 which is older but had more functionality like b/g/n wireless, bluetooth and faster upload speed. For just under $400 I get a 10” screen at 2.6lbs, 1GB RAM, 160GB HDD, 3 usb ports, 4-in-1 card reader, neat. It even came with a case which is shiny plastic and kinda tacky and i won’t use it.

I’m writing this post on it, and typing is fine — I’d eliminated the Acer and the 9” Eees cos i was constantly making mistakes on the keyboard, this one is fine. I have my usual tabs open in firefox, and have been happily surfing on it.

I suffered through installing stuff on it — firefox and add-ons, itunes, mcafee, ccleaner, and bemoaned Window’s lack of userability when i found myself forgetting basic stuff. The ability to hackintosh was a deciding factor in the decision to go for the Wind. Will I end up making it dual boot? Probably, but i’m not in any hurry.

As to the second important event, this was the first pic taken with the iphone camera. I have to do a big shrug cos it’s pretty pedestrian, even for “just” a 3MP camera. It will be useful for taking disposable pics for twitter, that’s it. I can see myself embracing this new form of photography though. At the very least, expect even more food pics.

I hadn’t planned on having spare time this weekend, so I didn’t bring the mbp. *gasp* So when I find myself with spare time I naturally started missing it, or wishing I had a netbook. There does seem to be a huge netbook mania nowadays. I think there is a time and place for netbooks — as second computers for basic tasks only — but it seems that there’s already feature creep on these machines.

The majority of netbooks are Windows (mostly XP) and Linux. The nearest mac equivalent is the mba or the new 13” mbp. Both very attractive machines undoubtedly but not even I will want to spend $1200 or $1500 on a spare laptop. If I wanted a mac netbook I’d have to get a regular netbook and hackintosh it. I missed out the chance to get a hackintosh-perfect dell mini 9, even though I’m sure it’s available on ebay. I’m not saying I will necessarily hackintosh any netbook I get, but hackintoshability is one of the criteria. Luckily lots of people are also interested in this, and bb gadgets have been keeping track of the various netbooks in the market. So it looks like I’m getting the MSI Wind U120.

Seeing that there seems to be more, more, more and even more rumours of a mac netbook, I’ll hold off getting an mba this year. May be upgrade to the new mbp, but I still need a smaller machine.
ars talked about why apple will or will not bring out a netbook. There are cases for an apple netbook: it’s all the rage, and there’s too many rumours and “we’re not doing it” statements…and we all know about these statements. OTOH a netbook means stripped down functionality, which apple doesn’t go for. Besides, it’s arguable that the iphone is a good netbook-quality small computer already.