Netbooks: A Cheap Alternative to Work Travel

Planet small biz, meet the netbook: a quick and relatively cheap portable computer that not only gets your small business more virtual but keeps your people off the road -- and away from burning pricey fossil fuels.

"Netbooks" (networked notebooks, get it?) are part of new product angle from big laptop vendors like Hewlett-Packard, (HPQ Quote), Lenova (LNV Quote) and Dell (DELL Quote). The marketing notion here is to create a line of computers with average computational power suited to run both standard business applications and the new generation of online business process apps delivered via the Web.

"A year ago, I don't think anybody in this thought this netbook market would be where it is today," says Jeremy Brody, Global Business Notebook Product Manager for HP, based Palo Alto, Calif. (Big note: If you have not at least touched online word processing, spreadsheet and other business applications, stop reading right now and go take a look. These online business tools -- Google's (GOOG Quote)Google Apps , Microsoft's (MSFT Quote) Microsoft Office Live, Adobe's (ADBE Quote) Acrobat.com to similar tools from Salesforce.com (CRM Quote) or NetSuite (N Quote) -- are excellent ways to get your people working where they live or from fuel saving remote offices.)

Netbooks -- and their desktop equivalents, dubbed nettops (networked desktops) -- combine an interesting mix of features: Netbooks are relatively light, around four pounds. They're nothing like the under-two-pound ultraportables, but lighter than the eight-pound-plus desktop replacements. They are relatively cheap, starting in the $500ish range, with properly configured units running around $700. Again, not as low-cost as super-discount notebooks, but far cheaper than high-end portables like the MacBook Air from Apple (AAPL Quote) or the Toshiba's (TOSBF Quote) r500.