A $100 smartphone beats 400$ netbooks from 2008 in terms of hardware. 1920 x 1080p full HD display, an 8-core processor with 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage.
I used a 2008 eee PC exclusively for all personal computing needs for about two or three years (web browser, videos, music, chat and programming in python, C++ and clojure), running Arch Linux. The only thing I didn't do on it was play games and I had a desktop in the office for professional work at the time. It worked perfectly fine. Hell, I miss it sometimes.
The problem is the difference between the aspirations and the reality. ZX81s did exactly what they were expected to do, the way they were expected to do it. Netbooks were almost universally bad. There were very few reasonable scenarios where they did what you expected them way you expected it. I have owned a Lenovo S10e for a decade now and have yet to find one of those scenarios.
In 20160-2017, I did the final year of my CS major using nothing but an IBM Thinkpad X40 (1.1 GHz ULV Pentium 4, 1.25 GB RAM). It was quite adequate. DrRacket, CompuCell, LibreOffice, Gimp, VirtualBox, it all worked fine. Such a lovely machine...
I did absolutely learn how to zoom out on the web, so many dialog modals would have off-screen buttons with no scrolling. It's still a pet peeve of mine to this day that I test with any modals.
I also used a chromebook for a few years... tbh, I only went back to a rmbp because I needed better VPN support where I was working... Of course, I generally avoid taking it with me anywhere, I use my work laptop at work (docked) and my desktop at home.. or my phone for the most part.
I have. Besides reading on the ferry (a netbook's screen is much nicer than a phone's smaller screen), and using the Arduino IDE, with a USB-to-serial converter it was also useful for configuring networking equipment.
I really did ton of work on MSI Wind. All kinds of work, even maintaining old Delphi codebases. Granted, it had probably the best keyboard of all netbooks of that time and most time I worked with external monitor.
I 'struggled' to use a Asus netbook for about 3 months, trying to use it as my daily driver for work. I was OK for notes and writing docs but not much else. Even web back in 2012 was terrible on it. ANd the keyboard was lame.
I started on windows, tried various Linux and ended up with Jolicloud on it, which was about the best I could hope for - but soon got a real laptop, and regretted wasting my cash on the netbook.
I used a EeePC 701 for a few months. I found it perfectly fine with Window Maker, though the keyboard was awful - but it did work and i'm not a big keyboard snob anyway so i just went with it.
I was able to play old games, chat on IRC and read the occasional web page (though only one page at a time) and even watch videos. That latter part was a bit annoying though since i had to transcode most videos to a lower resolution and simpler codec, otherwise the CPU wouldn't be able to keep up (i do not think there was any video decoding acceleration). This usually meant that if i wanted to watch a 30m video i'd had to wait around 2 hours :-P. But i allocated time for that, doing transcoding while sleeping or going out.
Sadly one morning i destroyed the screen by stepping on it - i often used it at bed and left it at the side and one morning i stepped on it when i woke up. I later bought an Acer Aspire One as a replacement - that one was much faster (though some video still needed transcoding) and it had a much better keyboard. Sadly i lost it by forgetting it at a bus station.
Recently i bought a used EeePC 701 from eBay for a few dollars. It is in almost mint condition and instead of Linux it comes with Windows XP. I find it funny that at startup the OS always complains about the resolution (800x480) being too low despite being the native one :-P.
> Recently i bought a used EeePC 701 from eBay for a few dollars...
That's the nice thing about those netbooks still - they're available used for a few bucks (a lot less than $100!) often in very good condition, and a mainstream Linux distribution will run fine on them, even booting from SD card storage (which a lot of modern hardware will fail at)! Sure, you do need 1GB RAM and quite a few gigs of storage space, so the original eeePC 700 series is a no go, but everything else in that class works reasonably well.
We do see projects like pmOS that aim to do pretty much the same thing for modern mobile devices (tablets and smartphones), but the difficulties there are huge due to all the bespoke hardware - there's just no comparison.
I think older netbooks such as the 700 series could find a new use either as IoT or VoIP terminals and other non demanding tasks, by fitting them with just the bare minimum OS to run a single full screen application. Not that different from the LibreElec distribution whose motto is "just enough OS for Kodi".
Example: a 701 paired with an external good quality audio card plus Jaaa [1] might become a small useful standalone instrument for audio alignment (generator + spectrum analyzer).
11-12'' screen notebooks offer the best of two worlds: portability and performance. I wouldn't trade my X240 Thinkpad for anything else as it takes (bag included) less than half the space in my motorcycle topcase, and the dual battery runs it well over 8 hours.
It has a nasty hardware problem though, as it completely freezes down to requiring a cold reboot if I grab it with my left hand in the empty space left of the trackpad, but it appears other Thinkpads share the same problem as well. However after some years I had absolutely no problems in normal use.
I don't think that is a defect of thinkpads at all. something is clearly broken in your particular machine. Is your hard drive located in that spot, loosely connected, and perhaps not connected at all when you squeeze it right there.
Fair point, though Netbooks where smaller than that here is a Dell Mini 9 with a fairly generous 8.9” screen, but many where even smaller. http://www.notebookreview.com/notebookreview/dell-inspiron-m.... The Eee 700 for example was 7”, but some where down in the 5” screen’s.
By comparison you get a 6” 1920 x 1080p screen on a 100$ ZTE ZMax PRO.
Is a smart phone really the best way to type an essay or create a computer program? I do see the movement towards touch-only devices in younger people, but I'm yet to understand how people can productively type on such devices.
You can easily connect any cheap USB or Bluetooth keyboard if a lot of typing is required. Of course you can't use such a setup while walking around somewhere, but usually you also don't write essays in these situations.
A smartphone is definitely not the most efficient way to type an essay, but I'd bet that many commenters here are composing responses on a smartphone while on the go. There's an adage for cameras that applies here - the camera you have on you is better than the camera that's sitting at home (caveat: assuming you're not at home). It's more than a little inconvenient to pull out a laptop to compose a response here while, eg waiting on the bus. Comments here reach essay length, and sure, it would be nicer to use a full size keyboard, but I'm on my smartphone already.
Additionally, it's worth watching how fast the younger generation that was raised on smartphone keyboards can type - some type impressive, though I've never measured wpm. Then again, I'm at the equivalent of index finger pecking on a regular keyboard on my smartphone's keyboard.
From what I've seen of the samsung desktop/docking options, it's pretty cool... looks like it'll be in android proper before long. As long as I can SSH and/or RDP to something beefier, I'd be happier docking my phone at work.
