I was looking for a netbook that was:
- cheap
- hi-res (i.e. 1366x768 - not much by notebook standards, but plenty by netbook standards, and enough for my purposes)
- capable of driving a large external monitor (for those coding sessions when I need lots of pixels)
- large enough to type fast on (12+ inches)
- faster than a single-core Atom-based netbook
As I discovered, there aren't many hi-res netbooks out there, and most are pretty pricy.
Eventually I noticed that B&H - from whom I buy a fair bit of camera gear - sell netbooks, and carry the ASUS 1215T, an AMD-based netbook that ticked all of my boxes, with Windows 7 and a dedicated graphics card to boot. So I ordered it in from the US (none of my Aussie suppliers carry it).
It's proving to be awesome bang for buck. Obviously it bogs down a little under intense CPU load, but development isn't very CPU-intensive, so that's not a big deal. Battery life is reasonable but not superb; again, not a big concern for me, and you'd expect a gruntier netbook to use more juice. The keyboard is up there with my 13" MacBook Pro in terms of feel, too ... not quite there, but very comfortable to use.
Anyway, consider this my personal recommendation for the 1215T. So good I imported two. (Actually that was just to make the shipping more worthwhile...)
