High Speed Internet Access (HSIA): Mobile Broadband

A US survey has found that there is some dissatisfaction amongst the purchasers of netbooks. Only 58% of those surveyed said that they were very satisfied with their netbook purchase. However the survey is obviously extracting information about the purchasers’ intentions before the purchase and whether they specifically set out to buy a netbook or whether they were looking for a notebook and ended up with a netbook. 70% of those who intended to buy a netbook all along were very satisfied with their purchase.

The conclusions by the research firm analyst are hardly surprising. When the expectations were not clearly set before the purchase there was more likely to be a feeling of disappointment because the netbook didn’t quite match up to the functionality and performance of a notebook.
Netbooks have smaller screens, keyboards and hard drives. They also are likely to be running on XP rather than Vista. Performance can be an issue depending on what you want to do and the ability to connect to other devices such as speakers, printer, DVD drive etc is limited.

The disappointment was greatest amongst the 18-24 year old group and their biggest issue was poor performance.

On the plus side the purchasers were impressed with the portability of netbooks although interestingly quite a large percentage never actually took the netbook out of the house.

The level of dissatisfaction is a bit surprising given the fact that netbooks are obviously smaller than notebooks. It’s the whole point given the aim of enabling mobility. With that comes inevitable sacrifices in terms of screen and keyboard size. For anyone wanting to keep in contact with friends, family and work colleagues, do a bit of web surfing and maybe keep up with social media sites like facebook or twitter, netbooks are ideal. Maybe the dissatisfaction amongst the younger age group was due to expectations of being able to do high end activities such as gaming or photo editing and being lured by the lower prices and portability advantages of netbooks over a more suitable notebook.

We have a list of popular netbooks that you can buy online at good prices. We also have a netbook buying guide if you are new to netbooks and need more overall information about typical features and functionality.

Subscribe to the hsia RSS feed

• 2nd Generation Netbooks: Lenovo’s Vision
• Smartbooks are the new Netbooks
• Why don’t Apple make a Netbook?
• Netbook Sales total 20% of the Notebook Market
• Dell Mini 10 getting GPS option