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.
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.
You know I wanted this.
Lifehacker’s netbook picks:
http://lifehacker.com/5273096/five-best-netbooks
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.
great idea :D
I’ll link my netbook price guide to this guide.
This is good. You could also add the average rating of the five categories for an overall 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. :D
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?
@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.