Organizers' Collaborative

The ever-falling price of computer hardware provides an additional reason to procrastinate your purchase. Of course, other reasons—tight budgets, maintenance costs, training—are ever present. For little of a year now netbook computers have been shaking up the industry outpacing even the popular iPhone in sales. For organizers, netbooks offer the best of several worlds: they're small and light—weighing in between 1 and 3 pounds—and therefore very portable, but also pack enough computing punch to run all but the most demanding applications.

Most importantly, though, the price of netbooks now hovers between $250 and $600. It is therefore possible to replace an aging desktop computer with a netbook capable of running all the popular computer operating systems including several flavors of Linux, Windows XP and even Apple's OS-X. So the $300 Mac is a reality, just not from Apple!

Ubuntu Netbook Remix screencast

Apart from its flexibility, widespread availability and relative low cost, most netbooks honor their names with great connectivity. Wi-Fi as we've come to expect is built in, 3 USB ports allow you to plug in wireless 3G sticks so you can easily connect on the road and in areas where Wi-Fi is less available. These come at a significant cost though—with wireless plans starting between $40 and $60. Radio Shack and several other chains have paired up with wireless providers to offer $100 netbooks that come with 3G services built in but with a minimum 2-year commitment to the wireless plan.

Some of the typical trade-offs one expects with these small computers are not too onerous for most users and uses. For example, the keyboards on most 10-inch screen netbooks are 95% of the typical notebooks size. The smaller screens are things that most of us have become accustomed to using when we text from our cell phones or browse with a mobile client. Interestingly, most Windows XP machines come with hard drives that can store hours and hours of video and sound files, not to mention plain old text documents.

In past, ultra-mobile PCs really skimped on battery weight and one ran out of power just when it was needed. The new netbooks often come with anemic batteries but a lively aftermarket set of accessories including long-life batteries exists. With 9-cell replacement batteries (costing about $60) you can extend your computing day to 8 hours! Additional accessories, small cases, keyboard protectors, etc., are also widely offered and extremely affordable. Equally, if not more important is the existence of many different web communities for enthusiasts and newbies to get support for their netbooks and to troubleshoot any problems they may encounter (see "Resources" below).

What software can you use during those hours? Pretty much anything that a small organization will use. The only difficulties come in when you need to edit video or complex graphics files. In these cases, both processing power and display sizes are too modest. Special versions of Ubuntu Linux—Ubuntu Remix—are available for free online. So too is Open Office.

Photos and video are important to today's organizer. I have found that working with small mpeg files and prepping them for YouTube, Archive.org or BlipTV is possible and relatively easy when using SD cards found in most digital cameras and recent video cameras. So for actions on the road, reports from the field, netbooks work! Anything more complex can be more comfortably produced with any late model desktop.

One minor downside to most netbooks is that they do usually do not come with an optical drive for DVDs & CDs. There are several workarounds: buy an external drive (~$65 or so) or load your files (or software) onto USB sticks or SD-Chips.

Taken together then these features—the connectivity, portability, low cost, and reasonable computing power—make netbooks a reasonable option for small groups, volunteer-based and non-profit organizations to equip their members and staff people. Right now, netbooks are undergoing an across the board upgrade as new processors come onto the market. This means that many of current generation netbooks are available at fire-sale prices.

As the netbook evolves more interesting possibilities like the mesh computing that the original OLPC (One-Laptop Per Child) ultra-light netbook promised, may become a reality. For organizers that will open the doors on new possibilities that we may be able to explore in future posts.

Note: OC began experimenting with using Organizers' Database, ODB, on the original 7" eee PC last April (see Rich Cowan's observations about his experience).

Resources:
Netbook Forums
NetbookBoards.com
Asus EEE PC
MSI Wind Forum