Mini-Computers Not As Magical Without Wi-Fi

If you are in the market for a light, thin portable laptop, take your pick. These thin portable computers are easy to carry and easy to use. They are perfect, right? Not quite.

Once away from a high-speed Internet connection, these laptops turn into a generically slow computer. You better make that an expensive, slow computer.

The idea behind the thin, internet surfing laptops, or netbooks, is that all people really do at their home computers is check their email, do a bit of brief looking around, perhaps some light online shopping and check their social pages like Facebook and Myspace.

These little beauties are terrific for those things, but there is one thing you have to have: a strong, quick connection. Without it, an unconnected machine’s power is restricted.

"I am convinced this class of products will sing when WiMax comes out," says Rob Enderle, principal analyst at The Enderle Group. "It kind of depends on … being always connected. As a disconnected device, outside of email and word processing, it’s not quite as interesting.

With consumers watching their budgets closely, these inexpensive netbooks are a welcome competitor on the market.

"We think that price is … affordable," said John Thode, a vice president at Dell. "We find that that is the right kind of price to encourage (the purchase of) second and third devices in a person’s portfolio."

The newest PC laptop, Dell’s Inspiron Mini 9, is a 2-pound machine with a 9-inch screen and wireless Internet card. At only $349, it is comparable to others created by Hewlett-Packard, Acer, ASUS, Intel and others companies targeting youngsters who prefer a full screen and keyboard to thumbing on smartphones.

Compare these PCs to others as a reasonable cross between pocket-sized smartphones, such as the iPhone and full sized laptop computers. Dell’s base model Inspiron 9 comes equipped with 512 megabytes of RAM memory, a 4-gigabytes solid-state drive, and built-in wireless network card.

"It (this category) could potentially be bigger than the existing laptop market," Enderle said. "If you believe in the cloud computing model of the future, this is the kind of product that leads up to that future."

According to PC Magazine computer analyst Cisco Cheng, the Dell PC’s skill to do large amounts with very little on-board assets comes with another unfortunate stipulation — like a majority PCs, it might crash.

"The combination of the Atom processor and 1 Gigabyte of memory gives you more than enough power to accomplish any general-purpose task, whether (you are) running MS Office 2007, encoding a video, running iTunes, watching YouTube, or playing online poker. Just don’t do all of these things simultaneously," he said in an online review.

Even with all the new technology and cost efficient computers, PC makers must not forget the ever-present danger of the iPhone and the iPod touch.