There are also ready-made ARM laptops with varying degrees of polishedness. For
example, I recently got a Hercules eCafe, which with a 50Wh battery (mid-range
in usual laptop terms) gets over 10 hours of battery life. Not bad for the
price of a half-reasonable netbook.
Entirely seriously, you can watch a
whole anime series, in 720p, on one charge. I've yet to see any x86 laptop that
can do that. As a bonus, there is no fan noise and it never gets too hot to
keep on your lap - or, since it is lightweight, on your chest for ultimate
relaxation in bed.
Downsides exist too. Storage is via a slow internal
Flash disk (effectively an SD card soldered to the motherboard), plus two SD
card slots for expansion. The internal speakers are rubbish beyond belief -
they sound like earbuds left on the table - although plugging in real headphones
makes a much better impression. With an 800MHz CPU, web page rendering is not
exactly snappy (though it's really not bad). And the bundled software, a remix
of an oldish version of Ubuntu, is buggy - I plan to try reworking it to get rid
of those bugs.
But overall it's a very nice little machine. Who cares about
thinness, when it's the battery and thermal characteristics that really make it
portable?
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