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I am in the market for a netbook — one of those small laptop computers that usually have a small screen and a low-speed and power-efficient processor — that I’d like to buy for my wife.

I am fortunate enough to have an office-provided thin-and-light notebook, but the one she has is a thick-and-heavy monster that gives her a back ache every other day.

So we did what most people do: google it!

Quickly enough, we had a line-up of the usual ones — the Asus eee pc series; the Acer Aspire One; the HP Mini series; the Dell Inspiron Mini series; and the Lenovo Ideapad S10.

These are the ones apparently available in India, according to Indian media Web sites.

At the time of writing, Asus’ and Acer’s Indian Web sites list their various models but there is no indication of pricing.

The HP India site has the HP Mini 1000 in the front page splash, but leads to the Asia-Pacific product page and no indication of pricing and variants.

Dell India’s site has no mention of the Dell Mini 9 or Mini 12. Out of Lenovo’s various ways to get to the Ideapad series details, some work and some don’t.

None of the sites except Aspire One’s have complete information on the software — office package or anti-virus or multimedia — that comes bundled with each variant of the machines.

And this for a product targeted at the non-techie for web-surfing and e-mail!

N. Nagaraj

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