Notebook/Netbook
 

2 Questions. Lets say price doesn't matter.

Q1) What is the lightest notebook/netbook available out there?

Q2) What notebook/netbook has the longest battery life (with no additional seperate battery to carry)?

Any thought?

Tintin

Solar powered tablet? :D

most of the newer netbooks get 6-8 hours , While my older Dell mini 9, Mini 10 only gets 2 hours,

With 2 batteries you would be able to do most flights :)

But check the touch pad and see if you like it, and the keyboards are small if you are a good typer ( I am not ! )

Downside of a netbook is no DVD player,

hope this helps a little

Rally

Keep in mind you can rip DVD's to files on another computer and play them on a netbook without a DVD player.

1) I think it's a toss-up between the high-powered tiny Sony model or the original Asus Eee 7" model. Huge difference in performance, though.

2) ~11 hrs seems to be the highest quoted right now (variety of netbooks). However, that's in lab conditions.

You didn't ask the right Q (IMO) and that's which notebook/netbook works best for what you're going to do with it.

If price doesn't matter, go with the business ultra-portables. Just as tiny as the netbooks but fully featured. Myself, I'd go with either the Lenovo X series or the Toshiba Portege (R) series. This Tosh has a built-in DVD player.

I agree Toshiba Portege R series is really great. I used to have a R100 (2.4lbs) 5 years ago. It was the best engineered laptop that time.

Which Sony model is you are refering to?

I like to buy one very light very powerful (64 bit, w/ 8GB RAM) with 10+ hours batter life :p. Oh! Well!

Tintin

That was the old Sony TZ series. Being so tiny, there were performance trade-offs so no way were you getting a system to the specs you've listed.

It's been a while since I looked at Sony so I checked their website and it seems the TZ series isn't made anymore. I see a Z series but it's not as tiny as the Tosh or Lenovo.

I've had 3 tosh porteges; my new work laptop is a Lenovo X201. It's not as thin as the new tosh, but they keyboard is much better.

I have a Dell Mini 10 knocking around the house for add-hoc browsing - 5 hours battery - If you make sure you order the right battery (56W).

MacBook Air. It now comes in 13.3" and 11.6" screen sizes. The battery life for both has been improved. 11.6" has a 5hr battery and the 13.3" has a 7hr battery. Full keyboard, trackpad, etc... No optical drive but you can use the drive from another computer with included software or you can buy a USB drive from Apple. It can also run Windows via Bootcamp(Bootcamp ships on every Mac). I recommend it.

Really is too bad that the battery life isn't great. Better battery with the iPad or the 13" MacBook Pro.

Unfortunately I have to agree. Apple devices in my opinion are great, powerful devices that get the job done every time, but don't get the battery life they claim.

Great information. The size and power of the new MacBook Air is appealing -- especially with the Bootcamp feature since I am a PC guy through and through. Small and powerful... would probably opt for the lower 64gb 11" or 128gb 13" model and just plug in some extra USB memory cards to hold movies and other large files.

The new Asus netbooks are rated for 12 hours more or less...thats using 9 cells.

Lightest netbook? Less than a kilo for sure...but a 7 inch and a 12 inch model doesn't differ much.

While I've got nothing against the Mac, the MBA certainly isn't a "powerful" machine.

If you like it great. However, a lot of the bleeding edge stuff that I do is always on PC first and on Mac as an afterthought, much farther down the road.

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Bleeding edge is on Linux. But I got really bored with Linux on desktops. All of our servers are some version of Linux or Solaris but not desktops. One of the great things about Macs is that they are basically Unix machines. So you can run MacOS, Windows as well as Unix easily without any fuss.