Last month I decided to find out what this netbook craze was all about and purchased an HP Mini 1000 running the HP/Canonical developed MIE (a stripped down Ubuntu 8.04 with an attractive coat of gloss on the surface). I gave it a fair shake, trying to use it at home, at work, and even on the road while on a trip to California last week.
And while I have to say that it is impressive that HP has managed to pack this much into a device which costs $400, the end result of my experiment was to conclude that netbooks are just cheap laptops and that all of the analyst/press/reviewer hoopla (Forrester recently called the Netbook the "third PC formfactor) is just marketing hype. What is more, unless your primary laptop is some huge boat which can't be moved around, or unless you've never been able to have a laptop— I can almost guarantee that the netbook performance will disappoint you to say nothing of the obvious screen/keyboard issues.
Prior to the popularization of smartphones, there might have been a role for these small machines as a new class of Internet access device. Unfortunately the space between the top of the smartphone range (or at least any smartphone that can run Webkit-derived browsers well) and a 12+ inch laptop that is portable is too small to squeeze a new product category into— especially one that doesn't deliver any new interface paradigms or real software innovation.
And on the subject of software (it always comes back to that), I am amazed that despite the apparent polish that HP and Canonical put into the MIE environment, they left such ridiculously obvious issues with the mobile experience unaddressed. The suspend/resume is still too slow and flakey (though this might be a Linux thing, I would imagine a customized kernel could have done a better job given that the hardware was known), and it still takes far too long for the machine to find and associate itself with a WIFI access point, even when it has been previously configured. In the world of 15-60 second "Internet snacking" these two bugs are deal killers.
[Come on guys, if you don't want to look as far as how quickly OSX latpops come out of sleep and on to the network, look no further than today's crop of smartphones and make that the target.]
Finally, back to the form factor issue for a second: though it is amazingly obvious in hindsight, unless you can put the device in a pocket (jacket or otherwise), its diminutive formfactor over other laptops just doesn't buy you anything other than a weaker battery that limits its use to about 2.5 hours (I got about a day of sporadic use assuming that the suspend cycle was working) and a screen which is bound to drive you to Advil after extended use.
It's too bad— I was really looking forward to using this machine all the time. But until suspend/resume and time-to-network are resolved (along with a number of other interface annoyances that have more to do with MIE's Linux legacy than anything else), it is destined for my graveyard of cool but useless devices.