Jump back in time with me a year. For sake of argument, it’s now July 18th, 2007; one year ago. The first thing I’m going to do is search Google for tomorrow’s winning lottery numbers and buy a ticket. More importantly, the second thing I’m going to do is scour the web for the best deal on an inexpensive but decent performing small notebook that weights two pounds or so. Hmm…. nothing’s coming up for under a grand or two… better hope I didn’t play the wrong numbers on that lottery ticket.
OK, let’s beam back to the future, or more appropriately, the present. I see that the new $379 Acer Aspire One is available and earned a decent 3.5 out of 5 stars from LAPTOP Magazine. We’ve already seen the first generation of the Asus Eee PC 700-series come and go… you can’t count the different Eee models on one hand any more thanks to the 90x and 1000. HP’s Mini-Note comes in no less than four flavors while MSI is blowing in the Wind with both an 8- and 10-inch model. And don’t forget we should see the Dell entry here as well at some point next month.
This is actually amazing to me. In October, I pretty much had once choice for this market and I took it with the purchase of my Eee PC 701. I’m glad I did because it opened up my eyes to new computing models. I’m also considering a new netbook purchase but I’m actually at a cross-roads due to all of the choices. Sure, many of the choices are similar to each other, which is why the big differentiator here is value. I used to think it was price, but with the many similarities, I’m leaning more towards "price and functions", hence: value. At this point, I think I’m going to wait and see what Dell unravels, but I’m still amazed at how quickly we went from no market to a product-saturated market!
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