With the dozens and dozens of emails I get about people looking for recommendations on which netbook to buy, I thought it would be better if I could round them all up and do a “buyer’s guide” of sorts.
The guide is composed of 5 categories I believe is very relevant to consumer buying decisions — feature, design, battery life, price and value for money — each of which will be given a score between 0 to 10, 10 being the highest and zero the lowest.
Of the 5 categories, 2 are objective ratings — price and battery life — so I rated them as such:
Battery Life Rating Score Card:
less than 2.5 hours: 6/10
2.5 -5 hours: 7/10
5 – 7.5 hours: 8/10
7.5 – 10 hours: 9/10
10 hours and longer: 10/10
Price Rating Score Card:
30k and higher: 5/10
25k – 30k: 6/10
20k – 25k: 7/10
15k – 20k: 8/10
10k – 15k: 9/10
under 10k: 10/10
The feature, design and value for money are somewhat subjective but I’m looking at a way to normalize them.
Here is a draft of that rating table. Will be updating them as I move along and improve the presentation.
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What’s your basis for grading features? For example, both the Lenovo S10 and the HP Mini 2140 have Expresscard slots, but rate the same 7 rating as, say, an HP Mini 1000, which has a tiny hard drive and no VGA out. And what feature does the Asus EEE PC 1000HE have that the Expresscard-equipped models do not have, apart from the larger battery (which would then be graded under battery life) to warrant a slightly higher “features” rating?
That’s a nice idea.. I’ll wait for the official post of your Netbook buyer’s guide, ‘coz I’m planning to buy one for college.
@Bon – I’m finalizing the part on the features and will write them down along with the price and battery life rating cards. For now, I am basing them on minimum specs – 80GB HDD and 1GB RAM. As such, the ratings on the features are not final yet.
This is good. You could also add the average rating of the five categories for an overall rating.
great idea
I’ll link my netbook price guide to this guide.
Hi Yuga, thanks for the draft. It sure is useful if I read it along with your reviews. Just a little off topic here, do you have word on the Acer Aspire Timeline: They have 12, 14, 15 inchers and they are so thin. Engadget has pictures and there is a review on youtube. Will they ever be released in the Philippines? Cheers.
Lifehacker’s netbook picks:
http://lifehacker.com/5273096/five-best-netbooks
You know I wanted this.
Yuga, for Battery life I suggest that certain things have to be on – Wifi, Power mode set to Portable/Laptop. The HP mini 2140 can last longer than 3 hours for example but that’s with Wifi off and power mode set to Max Battery.