Laptop Thoughts: Toshiba's New Mini NB250 Netbook

"Toshiba has recently presented a new netbook which we were able to do a hands on with at their 25th anniversary press conference here in Taipei. The Mini NB250 which is already available for purchase online with a starting price of $290. In the inside of the Toshiba Mini NB250 netbook you can find an Atom N455 processor, 1GB of DDR3 RAM memory, a graphics card powered by a GMA 3150, and a hard-drive that has 250GB of storage capacity. The screen size with LED backlight measures 10.1-inches and provides a resolution of 1024×600 pixels, and the usual extras include WiFi, a multi-touch trackpad, a few USB ports, and a memory card reader. There are two models that differ on the battery, while a 3-cell battery can last 4 hours, a 6-cell battery can go up to 8 hours."

Boy, the netbook market is sure boring now, isn't it? I'm generally bullish on netbooks in general - I don't buy the ridiculous "the netbook is dead" stories being bounced around the blogosphere lately - but I can't argue that netbooks are at all exciting lately. Huge numbers of people have bought netbooks in the past few years, and they're not going to upgrade them until something more exciting comes along - that's the main reason why sales are slowing down.

We've seen the CPUs inch forward slightly, but ATI or NVIDIA based GPUs are far and few between...I imagine this due to cost factors. So you end up the majority of netbooks sticking with the craptastic integrated Intel GPUs, capped at 1 GB of RAM, and using mechanical hard drives because SSDs are too expensive. Battery life is one of the few differentiating features, but for many users, four to five hours is enough. Design materials tend to be ho-hum as well, again due to cost. So the netbook is in a hard place. What's the last netbook that you got excited about?