A new crop of ultra-thin notebooks are bettering netbooks in speed and battery life. We've picked four of the best.
While netbooks were a sensation when they arrived two years ago, their limits are now legendary. Unless you’re happy to churn through basic Office tasks at a snail’s pace and surf the web through 10in screens with resolutions of 1,024 x 600, a netbook can never be your primary computer. As for playing full HD videos or games on a netbook, forget it.
This was partly rectified by the arrival of netbooks with NVIDIA’s ION graphics chipset, which works with Intel Atom CPUs to deliver better graphics and multimedia. But there’s yet another category of notebooks that are nearly as affordable as netbooks yet do graphics far better.
From vendors such as Toshiba, Fujitsu and Acer, they’re known as ‘ultra-thins’ or ULV (Ultra Low-Voltage) notebooks, and the standouts are the ones powered by AMD low-power processors and AMD’s M780G chipset. They’re only $100 to $200 more than a netbook but handle graphics as well as any full-sized notebook with integrated graphics.
Take Toshiba’s Satellite T110D/00C (above). With an 11in screen it’s the size of a netbook but has a superb 16:9 1,366 x 768 resolution and the ability to easily play HD video and low-end games. With its HDMI port, you can stream HD videos to your HDTV with only one cable needed.
The T110D/00C is a superior computing experience to that provided by Toshiba’s $599 NB300 netbook, but at $699 retail, is only around $100 more. Incorporating the ATI Radeon HD 3200 GPU, the M780G chipset in the T110D/00C provides the graphics processing power that’s the equivalent of a low-end graphics card. Try getting this from a netbook. What’s the catch? Battery life. Netbooks powered by Intel’s N450 Atoms or ULV processors last significantly longer in labs tests. But if battery life is not your main concern, you should seriously check out the ultra-thins.
Why netbooks aren't for everyone
Part of the reason the multimedia performance of netbooks is so anaemic is the restrictions imposed by Intel on netbooks using Intel processors and chipsets. These are designed to ensure a balanced configuration that will deliver a reasonable battery life. For instance, Intel asks netbook makers to restrict RAM to 1GB (although netbook users can manually upgrade to 2GB) and has only recently allowed manufacturers to include 1,366 x 768 resolutions on 10in screens. By using AMD components, the ultra-thin makers don’t have to work within these restrictions.