Top Tip

I have been bothered for quite a while about your coverage of netbooks. I have been using an Asus Eee PC 900HA (8.9 inch screen 160 Gbyte drive, 3 cell battery) for about 9 months. I love it. It goes with me everywhere. It has replaced my pda. Its larger screen and much larger storage capacity means that I can read and store documents from the device easily, as well as use it occasionally for conventional PC tasks such as surfing and light editing. It is much larger than a pda, no longer pocketable, but still portable enough to go into a light bag that goes with me. I'd rather have a netbook than a smartphone as a replacement for a pocket computer -it's more capable, and easier to read, and still portable. When I know that I will be using my netbook for many hours away from external power, I dim the screen. It is still eminently usable in this mode. The only problem is that Outlook cannot remind me of a meeting when the netbook is in sleep mode. This is presumably because no one expected that Windows XP would ever be used to run a pda-like device, so it does not know how to be on but inactive until a specific time. If this problem were fixed, my netbook would be a perfect pda replacement. Your reviews are impressed with larger screens, larger keyboards, larger batteries. These features all make the device less portable - more like a laptop, less like a pocket pc. I have a laptop, but I don't carry it with me everywhere. I use the laptop as I would any other PC. Your editor's choices should reflect the unique and useful features of netbooks as replacement for the now dead category of pocket pc/pdas, rather as replacements for laptops. Because you and other reviewers are stressing and giving editor's choice awards to the wrong benefits of a netbook, the manufacturers are also going toward larger screens, keyboards and batteries. I fear that when the time comes to replace my current netbook, there will not be much hardware to replace it with.