Netbooks vs notebooks: which should you buy?

The idea of a netbook isn't exactly new. Microsoft first touted the concept of a small laptop-style device with a long battery life as far back as the late 1990s. Back then it was pushing its Windows CE Professional operating system.

This was a lightweight OS that belonged to the same family of products that later become the Pocket PC and then Windows Mobile.

The machines that ran this OS, including the IBM Workpad Z50 and HP Jornada 820, used low-power processors, had Flash RAM instead of a hard drive, and sported relatively small screens. However, these devices never really caught on and were eventually quietly phased out.

More successful were sub-notebooks - as pioneered by Toshiba with its Libretto range. These gave you all the functionality of a Windows laptop, but in a much more compact package. These types of devices were very popular in Japan, but never became big sellers in Europe. In part, this was due to their high cost. Buying a Libretto or something similar often meant shelling out well over a grand.

The latest run of netbooks, in comparison, have met with instant market success. This is due in part to their reasonable tags from £200 up, but it's also because they seem to offer much of the functionality of a grown-up laptop, especially now that most models are available with Windows XP as well as (on certain models) a simple Linux OS. But the question remains: does a netbook really have enough power to be relied upon as your sole computer?

What about connectivity?

As the name suggests, netbooks are really aimed at people who want an easy-to-use device that gives them access to the internet, and they certainly seem to deliver on this front.

All of them come with Wi-Fi built in and an increasing number now also have Bluetooth on board, so they can be connected wirelessly to a 3G mobile phone for internet access on the move. Some of the latest models are even being offered with built-in 3G, so that they can be used straight out of the box with mobile broadband services.

Companies like Carphone Warehouse and Currys offer these models for free when you take out a mobile broadband subscription. However, the cheapest netbooks, such as the Eee PC 4G, use screens that are only 7-inches wide and have a resolution of only 800 x 600 pixels.

This means that when they're used to view a normal web page, the whole width of the page isn't viewable at any one time. As a result, you often have to scroll the page back and forth to read a full line of text and this can make them frustrating to use.

Thankfully, these low-resolution screens are being phased out in favour of newer displays with a higher resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels. The extra horizontal resolution means that most web pages fit comfortably, negating the need for excessive scrolling.

Does it have enough grunt?

Nevertheless, you may still experience some other performance-related issues when surfing the web on a netbook, as the web is becoming more and more of a multimedia playground. A few years ago it was relatively rare to stumble across a web page with lots of animation and video content, but both are everywhere on the internet today.

Most of this multimedia content is built using Flash. Flash can be demanding in terms of processing power and we've certainly found that pages which are heavily reliant on Flash can slow down netbooks considerably, especially if you're running another application alongside your browser, such as a virus scanner.

On some web pages, standard Flash content can place over a 30 per cent load on a netbook's processor. Add in an additional load from a virus scanner and you're looking at really sluggish performance.

Flash is increasingly used for video content too, and the BBC uses it for its iPlayer service. Depending on the video stream, BBC iPlayer can gobble up to 60 per cent of a netbook's processor performance, leaving little headroom for handling other Windows XP tasks.

And while the Windows version of the Eee PC 1000 can play shows from iPlayer in full screen mode without any problem, we found the same model running under Linux struggled with full-screen playback, producing very jerky video that was all but unwatchable.

• Read TechRadar's Asus Eee PC 1000H review

So although a netbook is fine for most internet tasks, there are times when you'll wish you had the extra grunt of a full-blown laptop on tap.