Virgin Freedom Netbook review

We mentioned about the Virgin Media Freedom netbook back in July and finally, I was able to get my hands on this netbook for a short while. This netbook comes with an 10.2-inch screen and weighs just about the Acer Aspire One (1.1kg). It has 120GB HDD, 0.3 megapixel webcam. It runs the aging Intel Atom N270 processor and has (boring) Windows XP on board.

Strangely and surprisingly, most of the cellular providers love using the small 3-cell battery in their netbooks. What is the point of being mobile when you can use your netbook for only few hours? The Virgin Freedom netbook uses a 3-cell, 3300mAh battery for which Virgin Mobile claims that it will be give you two and a half hours of runtime. Another minus point of this netbook is the fact that there is no built-in bluetooth radio in this netbook. As a result of this, one cannot tether his cellphone to share its Internet Connection. We, in UK, get fairly high data transfer speeds and it would have been nice if I was able to share its Internet connection. WiFi (b/g/n), fortunately, is there. So you can go to Starbucks and enjoy browsing your favorite website or checking your mail while having coffee.

On this little netbook, one would find only two USB 2.0 ports as opposed to the normal 3 USB ports found on most of the netbooks in the market. Strangely, 3G is not built-in and you have to use the supplied Virgin media dongle.

There is a one huge turn off though. I am not the biggest fan of contract-based netbooks. Some people may fancy the deceiving “free netbook concept”, but I do not want to own a computer which binds me into a 1 or 2 year contract with my cellphone provider. If you are getting the Virgin Freedom Netbook, you will have to enroll yourself into a 2 year contact. True, you can get it for FREE, but you will be required to pay 20 pounds for the first 3 months and 29 pounds per month after that.

[Virgin Netbook]