I can get 9 hours out of mine easily, and 10-11 hours if I don’t open Picasa or stream video.

This beats my Blackberry with regards to continuous-use life, and it also means that I never bring the charger with me. I charge it at night and go. I’ve yet to drain it in the course of a single day.

I don’t install Mac or Linux on the machine because those two operating systems have been shown to cut netbook battery life up to half. Also, I usually have my 13″ Macbook Pro with me (and sometimes the 17″), so if I need OS X … I have full-fledged OS X with iLife, etc right there with multi-touch on a full-speed laptop.

I’m not sure if I would be satisfied with OS X without Expose and gestures. It almost feels like it would defeat the point.

Eventually, I believe that Linux will be tuned to surpass XP, but they still don’t have Wimax drivers or accelerometer support in Linux. OS X is hit and miss with regards to supporting all features (such as the advanced disk protection and trackpad gestures). It also does not support WiFi on the Toshiba, which is kind of a big deal.

As such, XP seems to be pretty much the way to go currently. I haven’t tried Windows 7 yet.

Mike I assume Rex is using clear, formerly known as clearwire, read the plans here http://www.clear.com, limited service in a few cities so far…

lmao

Typing and driving can kill your destination route.

You didn’t mention the looks you get when you hold a netbook up to your ear to make a phone call. The only thing better is doing a Skype video call using the netbook’s built-in web cam.

I marvel at how people are thinking a netbook is “new”. They aren’t! I own a Dell X1 laptop that I purchased back in 2005. With the extended run time battery it only weighs 2.5 lbs. It has a 1.2Ghz Centrino processor, 2 GB RAM and 80GB hard disk, as well as a 12.1″ screen. It is the physical size of most of today’s netbooks with the horsepower of a full laptop.

Even with my Dell X1, I still carry a T-Mobile Wing (Windows Mobile) smartphone, which is provided by my employer. To this day it marvels people when I use the built-in Powerpoint to do a presentation and have it feed wirelessly to a projector. I walk around doing the presentation and people wonder how the presentation is taking place. For newbies I normally have to take a couple of minutes to explain my technology (technology that is years old). For many situations, my Wing replaces the need for even my X1 laptop.

The one aspect you didn’t mention with most of the smartphones available is the cost and limitations of their data plans. The two major carriers (AT&T and Verizon) put a cap on the amount of data you can pass during a month before zapping you with per megabyte charges. T-Mobile, Sprint, and some others have ‘unlimited’ plans that really unlimited. Sprint will drop your account if you us too much bandwidth during the month (without telling you how much is too much) and T-Mobile will just mysteriously start to have drop-outs and outages if you hit their hidden limits. I don’t know much about Clear service other than it is extremely limited as to which cities in the U.S. where you can have coverage. I understand you have the Clear service and I bet it won’t work for you if you ever find yourself down in Primm or up at Indian Springs.

Seriously, though, I dunno how much control you get over a netbook (I assume “all of it”), but you should probably look into Win7 if you plan to keep that netbook longer than, eh, six months.

I am looking forward to Sploogle’s system as well, assuming they have wireless modem drivers.

This reply is being typed at the intersection of Charleston and 4th while waiting for a red light on my way to Fremont.

Vegas, Baby!