A New Toy

Negligent fellow, that Santa. For a couple of weeks now I've been scouting around for a new laptop. Christmas has come and gone, yet despite food being left out for reindeer and mince pies left in the hearth, there was no joy.

I guess he's got sloppy without any competition, or maybe that 'Spitting Image' video below was a wee bit close to the bone for him. Either way, in time-honoured fashion, to get something done properly I had to do it myself. And so it was that I could be seen emerging from one of Princes Street's myriad consumer electronics emporia late this afternoon as the proud owner of a dinky little Samsung netbook.

First of all, let me blow a resounding raspberry at PC World, who are still selling this particular model at the same price in their sale as they were before, despite most retailers having cut almost £20 off the price overnight. These computers can also be obtained free if you take out a 3G mobile broadband contract at the same time. A fantastic deal for someone, which left me cursing the fact that I already have such a long-term contract in place. See being an early adopter? Harumph....

There's actually not a lot that's wrong with my old IBM laptop. I've had it for about 3 and a half years now and it's still going pretty well. Unlike flashier contemporaries, it never claimed to 'do' multimedia (it's a laptop, for crying out loud – your 'multimedia experience' is going to be through a set of headphones on a train). Instead, it came built like a tank and eschewed all but the most essential features, which is probably why IBM and now Lenovo laptops remain so popular with corporate IT departments worldwide.

Kitted out in angular, Kevlar-like black plastic in a design which never changes from year to year, they just seem to say, in the most understated way possible, that serious people doing serious work don't mess about. Now, I've got a spreadsheet to update - what was it that you were trying to get your flabby and tarnished lump of overpriced, gaudilly-coloured plastic to do again?

Anyway, thanks to the costs of replacing a dud battery holding less than 10 minutes charge (nearly £100 by the looks of things), the IBM laptop has been relegated to home duties only, where it will stay plugged into a big monitor, a full sized keyboard and, of course, the mains electricity supply. Instead, that £100 has been put towards the new netbook, which at just over 1kg and with a screen size of 10”, is a considerably smaller beast, even though it is every bit as powerful.

What tipped the balance for me was the growing realisation that despite being a portable computer, the IBM wasn't, well, very portable. Combined with the bag and the power supply, it was adding about 5kg to my luggage every time I went somewhere (that was enough for Easyjet to sting me for £25 in excess baggage once!). Humphing it around airports and railway stations when combined with a case on wheels took some doing. My mobile phone can deal with most things valiantly, but sometimes, it's a computer you need and nothing else will do. In the end, the idea of having something smaller and lighter for those occasions when I was out on the road began to take on an obvious appeal.

So, I've now got a remarkably well-spec'ed little machine, with enough USB ports to keep me going, a network port (a seriously underrated feature), a surprisingly good keyboard, a lightweight power-pack (v. important), no annoying sticky-out bits when you want to use Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, and best of all, a battery which lasts for about 6 hours on a full charge.

There's no fancy speakers or DVD drive to weigh it down (when did you last use yours, anyway?), and while the screen is much smaller than what I'm used to, it's perfectly adequate for everything I'm likely to ever want to do on it. I've also managed to avoid the deadweight that is Microsoft Vista, getting one which runs the perfectly adequate (for a laptop) XP. Thanks to the wealth of free software there is out there, like Firefox and the superb OpenOffice suite, there isn't another piece of expensive Microsoft software on it. Cha-ching!

After all, what is it that most of us want a laptop for? If it's to download movies or do some serious filesharing (legally, of course), then you'd be better off with something else entirely. If it's to pose at your local Starbucks, then you've probably already bought a Mac or a Sony Vaio. If, on the other hand, you're like me and only want to surf the web, check your emails and do some simple word processing or number-crunching when you're out and about, then you can jettison most of the features. Just give me a good battery, a fast processor, a decent keyboard, ease of connection to the outside world and I'll be perfectly happy with that.

It's amazing what can be achieved when manufacturers stop trying to get laptops to be desktops, and just concentrate on the basic functionality which people need when they're on the move. My traveling, like my bank account, just got a little bit lighter.