I've just become the pleased owner of a Toshiba NB-100 netbook, with Ubuntu Netbook Remix pre-installed, and it's a lovely little machine. I bought it in Comet in Lancaster, in the hope of doing my little bit to make Linux more mainstream in chain stores. I've noticed that Currys and PC World switched to stocking netbooks with WinXP as soon as they became available, so Currys has to be congratulated for still stocking an Ubuntu machine -- though I did have to explain to the shop assistant that offering me a half-price deal on Norton Anti-Virus really wasn't that good an bargain... :-)<br>
<br>But back to the machine. It's compact and well made (feels like it will take a fair amount of bashing around in my rucksack) with a *very* shiny lid (looks cool but shows fingerprints like nobody's business). Sports a 1.9GHz Atom processor, 512Mb RAM, 80Gb hard drive, built in wifi and SD card slot and a 8.9in 1024x600 screen which is incredibly sharp and remarkably bright (you can actually see it outdoors on a sunny day!). The battery is supposed to last around 3 hours, and on a quick test this afternoon, downloading a bittorrent while reading a PDF, making notes in OpenOffice and ocassionally looking things up in Firefox, it did 3 hours 10 minutes. <br>
<br>Other hardware things -- 3 USB ports, a monitor port, network cable socket, sound input and headphone sockets, a built-in microphone and a webcam. Plus function keys to deal with everything from sound volume to icon size. You can even turn the fan off for those times when you're trying to sneak up on someone. No CD/DVD drive, of course, but portable externale drives are pretty cheap these days.<br>
<br>And it's fast. I think it must be the hard drive, but it's must more responsive than my Dell Inspiron laptop running Ubuntu, and that had a 2.3 GHz CPU. OpenOffice.org loads in about 12 seconds without the Quickstarter, and that took about 30 seconds on my old machine. <br>
<br>The keyboard, I like. I'm typing this with no trouble. Though I do have small fingers, and I suspect that anyone with big fingers might find it difficult to type on successfully. I wouldn't recommend it as a sole machine for doing a lot of typing unless you're sure your fingers will cope. I spent an entire summer living in a tent and typing on a Psion Revo, so I'm quite happy with it. My only grumble is the touchpad. The mouse buttons are only about 5mm wide, and it's very easy to accidentally touch the touch pad when pressing a button, which makes the cursor go to places it shouldn't. But I expect I'll get used to that. If not, I can always use an external mouse.<br>
<br>Ubuntu Netbook Remix is lovely. It's based on Hardy Heron, but with a redesigned interface which uses the small screen size to its fullest extent. When you boot up, you get a three pane interface, with menu categories (office, multimedia, internet, etc) on the left, a big pane in the middle showing the current icons for the menu category selected, and directories in your home folder in the right pane. The first category in the left pane is Favourites, and programs from other categories can be put in there, so you have everything you normally use right in front of you at startup. <br>
<br>There's only one toolbar on the screen, at the top. This has an Ubuntu icon at extreme left (which takes you back to the interface) and on the right icons for thing like battery state, wifi signal, volume control, time etc. In the middle there are tabs for each of the programs you have loaded (just an icon) with the program you're currently using as a large tab with title on the toolbar instead of the usual window header bar. This saves a whole line of text, giving you more program display space. It strikes me as a really good example of interface design. But if you don't like it, its a simple matter of a single click on an icon in the Preferences screen and you're back to the default Ubuntu desktop. <br>
<br>Oh, and the price -- £219.99, a whole £50 less than the equivalent machine with Windows. <br><br>I've seen some less than complementary reviews of the NB100. But they mostly boil down to "it's not sufficiently different to other netbooks" or "it's styling is old-fashioned" -- superficial aesthetic judgements from people who worry too much about style. To me, it looks like a laptop -- shiny on the outside, workmanlike when you open it, and an interface that's a pleasure to use. I think we're going to be friends :-)<br>
<br>-- <br>Ken Walton<br>