2008 was the year of the netbook.  This may be a term you might not be familiar with, you might not even be familiar with the Asus Eee PC.  These things are due to become hot property in 2009 and 2010, but are they worth buying?

First of all a short history lesson.  The netbook is a concept born from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project from 2005 that set about the task of bringing laptops costing only $100 to the developing world.  These machines are simple, wind-up and relatively basic computers, but they are computers none the less.  The concept can even be traced back further to UK technology company Psion who’s innovative Series 3 and Series 5 computers, and later the ill-fated ‘netBook’, yes, they initially coined the term back in 2000, first made mobile computing available to the masses.

People in the West fell in love with these tiny, go anywhere, mini laptops that, when they hit the market at $199 on a give one get one basis, where you bought two with one being donated to a developing country, proved very popular.

Asus was the first company to commercialise the concept, creating the Eee.  It was hugely underpowered, had a very small screen, hardly any memory and very little storage, only 8Gb compared to 320Gb on a laptop.  Yet this machine wasn’t intended to be used as a day-to-day computer.  Costing only about £200 it was small enough to slip into a bag or a briefcase for some occasional web browsing and email.

Since the Eee came out just about every PC and laptop manufacturer has jumped into the market.  Intel have released a new low-power processor, the Atom, that’s perfact for this type of machine, and these mini-marvels come in all flavours up to reasonably powerful models for £500.

I was a huge fan of mobile computing and had several Psion machines including the Psion Series 3a and Series 5.  I wasn’t personally so excited by the new Eee however, and it’s all about what we use our computers for today.

Should you be thinking of buying yourself a netbook the first question you should ask is what you’re likely to want to do with it.  They’re great for casual web browsing and email but their small keyboards make them fiddly to use for touch typing, so you can probably count out word processing, they also have very small screens so spreadsheets are probably out of the question too.  There’s very little storage on most of them which rules out music and video playback and they’re very low power so you can’t do more than one thing at a time.  On the face of it that doesn’t sound very useful.

But there’s another reason to avoid them, Intel.  The processor manufacturer will be releasing an upgraded version of the Atom chip during 2009 with two processing cores, the current processor only has one.  This will greatly increase their power and it’s certain that future machines will feature more memory as component prices drop.

Many of the current machines also don’t run Windows, instead choosing a Linux-based operating system.  This will probably confuse many people initially but, for the purposes a netbook will be put to the OS is usually configured with a spangly interface to make getting around it easy.  It will mean though that any programs you have on your PC, iTunes for example, won’t run.  Windows 7, due out in 2009 will aim to redress this and initial tests indicate it runs happily on netbooks.

The final thing to consider is that while there may be a plethora of these things on the market, they are essentially a version 1 product.  And version 1 products should always be avoided any cost.  When you consider that you can buy a laptop with a big screen and full-size keyboard from £400 it’s not looking great for the netbook.

So are netbooks useful?  Yes, but only in a very limited way.  Don’t assume that you’ll be able to replace your computer with one or use one for long periods, you won’t.  I’d also recommend waiting for the version 2 products with the dual-core Atom processor and Windows 7.  When that happens… I’m buying one.