ARM to overtake Intel in Netbooks and Smartbooks? – We DISAGREE!

Currently, there is no doubt that Intel is the uncrowned king in the netbook market, but according to the market analysts, ARM will surpass Intel by the year 2012. According to this analyst, Intel-powered netbooks have started to become very expensive and cost more than $200 and offer just 3.5 hours of battery life. On the other hand, ARM-powered netbooks will cost less than $200 and will also last much longer: 8 hours.

Our take on this:

The comparison is baseless. People want Windows OS on their netbooks. They want to use their desktop apps on their netbooks for which they require Windows OS. Unfortunately, since Microsoft has already confirmed that it has no plans on bringing their desktop OS to the ARM-architecture, you are left with nothing but Linux or Google’s Chrome OS.

We believe that smartbooks can never surpass netbooks in terms of sales even if they are offered for less than $100. Clearly, they offer little advantage over the current slew of smartphones which do much more than emailing and web-browsing alone. Also, in their comparison, they said netbooks have 3.5 hours of battery life. Wrong as most of the netbooks these days come with 6-cell batteries which offer more than 5-6 hours of run-time with active Wifi usage. Looks like these analysts have been taking in account the netbooks that were released last year.

6-cell battery for HP 2140 –a must have!

One fellow member at myhpmini forums has bought a 6-cell battery for his HP mini 2140 off ebay and he has been able to get pretty decent battery life from it. He used USB mobile broadband card in 2140 all the time and kept his netbook in  power saving mode to get nearly 5-6 hours of battery life from it. No doubt, he recommends the 6-cell battery to everyone.

It makes me wonder why some manufactures are still shipping netbooks with 3-cell batteries which are not able to give you more than 2 hours of active usage. My EEE 1000H came with a 6-cell 6600mAh battery and I am able to get nearly 5.5 hours in Vista with mobile broadband on at all the time.

You can get a 6-cell battery for the HP Mini 2140 from HERE. They ship worldwide

HP launches Mini 5101 – Inspired from VAIO TZ?

HP has launched the Mini 5101 netbook, which looks more professional than almost any netbook ever launched. Although the Mini 5101 comes with same basic specs, but it comes nicely dressed in aluminum and magnesium coating, which adds a bit of class to it. Also, it is nice to see that left and right click buttons are now placed below the trackpad.

It comes with a 7200 RPM HDD, Bluetooth 2.0, 2 megapixel webcam and a 10.1 inch LED screen. You have the option to choose between non-HD (1024 x 600) and HD (1366 x 768) resolution. You can even opt for a SSD (128GB), otherwise it comes with a 80GB HDD. It will be available in July with a price tag of $449.

It looks like HP designers took a lot of inspiration from the VAIO TZ design and the end product is pretty sharp-looking. Also, I have always been huge fan of keyboards of HP netbooks and this is no different. I absolutely adore that large right shift key!