I bought this Advent 4213 on Friday.  It is one of the latest crop of netbooks on the market.  You may recall that I bought the baby that started this trend, the Asus eeepc 701over a year ago.  I thought at the time it was revolutionary, and so much so that they now account for 10% of the market.  This is one of those bits of technology that has the power to change how we work.

It uses the Intel Atom processor (as most of them do now), has a 160 gb hard drive and 1 gb of ram, with a 10″ screen, and uses windows XP.  This means it is a real little laptop, but only weighs 1.4kg.  That is double the weight of the Asus, but I’ll take that trade for sake of the bigger screen.  Also the windows software takes it out of the geek-sphere into computing that I can customise.  I have every application on it that I need, and I’ll be interested to see if it means I no longer use a ‘real’ laptop. 

It is early days yet and I have only just set it all up.  It’s secret weapon is the built in 3g modem that allows you to access internet anywhere.  You can also ‘tether’ it to your mobile phone too via Bluetooth.

So far I am impressed and if you are clever you can pick one up very reasonably (between ?220-280).  This is a clone of the market leading MSI Wind but sells at ?30-50 cheaper for basically the same machine.

Watch this space for real-life field tests!

Resources:

• Detailed Specification
• PC Pro Review