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Aside from all of the above, the computer I wanted had to be affordable. I was well aware that there are plenty of sexy looking sub-notebooks to be found for a couple of thousand or more. Sorry, but to me they would be just an expensive luxury purchase.
The HP 2133 Mini-Note Netbook, which can be had for just under AUD$1000, was much closer to what I wanted. I liked it when I evaluated it some months ago - it had a beautiful keyboard although the 8.9 inch screen was a tad small. However, now that I was actually considering it as a purchase, to me it seemed that HP had sort of missed the point with this machine.
With a 160GB hard drive, 2GB RAM and running Vista Business on a VIA processor the HP Mini-Note seems like an over-engineered netbook posing as an underpowered a sub-notebook. Anyway, for me $1000 is way too much to splurge on a netbook.
The Asus Eee PC running a customised plug and play Linux distro created a sensation when it was first released last year for under $600. The problems it had were the limitations of that particular operating system, the tiny 7-inch screen, no hard drive but a limited amount of solid state storage, and an uncomfortably small keyboard.
In the past year, Asus have stolen the march on the rest of the market with follow-up improved versions of the popular netbook (although Acer and others are trying valiantly to match the Eee PC with their own netbooks).
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