yes its a bargain! at 600 pounds... hmmm mobile phones are bad enough without double selling again!

Surely you mean "included in the price of...".

Until tomorrow, 3 are doing half price broadband contracts through quidco, which makes 1Gb/month work out at £120 over 2 years (ordered mine today). Add a decent netbook onto that and you might as well buy then separately.

...Windows is the wrong OS. A Linus flavour (possibly pared down) is the only real OS for these machines.

And as pointed out about - the price still work out to be way over the odds.

Via C7 comes to itself if you use VPN and your VPN software is capable of using the hardware acceleration. In that case it can run circles around much "beefier" CPUs. The much slower 1GHz C7 can deliver several times higher performance than 2.4GHz Xeons. I would not expect the 1.6 GHz C7-M in this machine to be any worse than that. Probably even better. As a result using VPNs with this machine is almost "free of charge". For this reason alone this may end up being my next laptop (if it really ships with Ubuntu for sub-300£).

In fact, how about some benchmarks on fetching a file over VPN or on accessing content from a TLS-ed website. That would make an interesting comparison and after all if you use SCC you usually keep your data elsewhere so there is a point to it:-)

"Certainly portable"

Shouldn't that read: "Certainly possible to photoshop someone's hand onto a picture of the thing"?

I've just bought an Acer Aspire One for £193 from Tesco (inc £5 discount) and have a Three 3G modem with 1G/month at £5/month ... that's just £13/month over 24 months!

The webbook is underpowered and too heavy and too big compared to the Acer.

The only thing that limits the Acer ... as does just about every other SCC at the moment ... is the tiddly battery ... however as the Acer is soo cheap then when the 6-cell batteries become readily available I can easily afford to upgrade it and have a 3-cell spare 8-)

Actually, it's not £600. You're paying £25/month, of which £15/month is for the internet dongle, which orange sell on its own. So actually, you're paying 24 months x £10 = £240, which is a little less than retail value for the laptop.

Not that I'm saying £15/month for mobile internet is a good price, of course - it would have to be closer to £10 (with a much better guarantee of reception).

You make it sound as is you'd be paying £600 for the webbook alone. You can get the same contract without a laptop for £15 a month with Orange. So really your paying an extra £240 for the webbook, which is actually a saving.

What's the point of using a crippled version of Windows XP on these webbooks. It makes no sense.

Webbooks are all about quick, secure access to the Internet at the lowest price.

You can't do that with Windows XP, version crippled. It'll be slow, insecure and expensive.

Paris, because only idiots like her buy webbooks with Windows on them.

Not content to plumb the depths of the barely adequate Acer Aspire One battery life, this netbook is even worse!

So, the Acer Aspire One with a six cell battery has a smaller screen and an inferior trackpad, but is cheaper, generally faster and has well over twice the battery life.

Oooh. Tough decision, that..

Why do you lot keep barking on about the option of Windows on these things? it's obviously there for one reason only: compatibility. Yes it won't run as well, but it will give many users the peace of mind of knowing that whatever they load onto, or plug into, it, it will 95% work.

Horses for courses, and as long as you have the choice, what's the problem?

"...compatibility...peace of mind..."

Correcto. Maybe the Linux options do run very marginally better (no better on battery life though). But the time saved is negated by the time spent fannying around trying to get stuff to work. Assuming that there even is a way.

It might not be the optimum hardware for the job, and call me crazy if you like, but ("because I can") I'd be wanting to run AutoCAD 2000 (& Paint.NET & other progs like Inkscape, OpenOffice, Sketchup, Blender, Apache2Triad, &c) on one of these fellas.

No problem at all on XP - I'd be up and running in no time. And stick Avast!, Firefox with the usual Add-ons, Lavasoft Ad-Aware, Spybot Search & Destroy, and CCleaner on to an XP machine and the security benefits of Linux become negligible, too.

Bang on all you like about how Linux has alternatives, but there are some glaring holes that even Wine or "the forums" can't sort out.

The so-called "Windows Tax" for having XP on these SCCs runs at around £20. To me, that's a fair price. And the best value for money (for me) is represented by running FOSS (+ a few select others) on XP.

Remember that if your prefered Linux configuration is not available then you can buy the Windows machine, decline to accept MS's T's&C's, install Linux, and claim the cost of the MS licence back. But "You might need to do some searching around in the forums on how to do that." - as Lintards are so fond of saying. :-)

Tux is quite cute though.

Meh. Such a ridiculous battery renders all other elements irrelevent.

I'll get an EEE 901 or Dell Mini 9 when they're available for £249.99, and no sooner. Or an Aspire One or Advent 4211 for the same price if they can double up on battery life.

I saw one of these in CPW in Chicester recently - it was running Ubuntu Linux!

I assume it was not a one off so here's an option that appears to be less publicised?

On the Linux compatibility side, considering a fully functional OpenOffice, skype etc etc there is no problem with compatibility for the things you want - but compatibility with crapware & viruses plus the consequent need for performance sapping antivirus software is something I can easily do without!

The disapointing things for me were the absence of webcam and the fact that the build quality appeared worse and any other netbook/scc that I've seen. Oh yes and the battery life is poor

It's much easier to tweak applications to run on the strange low resolutions these laptop screens have.

With Windows you end up with dialogs appearing with buttons that aren't visible. In the Linux desktops you can CTRL drag the window so you can see the buttons, can't do this with Windows!

http://direct.tesco.com/search/default.aspx?search=Acer+Aspire+One+&confirm.x=0&confirm.y=0

£269 + Delivery, hardly £195..

Which is the point.

At £269..it's only a SC...not a SCC...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Acer-Aspire-One-Netbook-Seashell/dp/B001BZ923O/ref=pd_cp_ce_1?pf_rd_p=136153791&pf_rd_s=center-41&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=B001BZ920W&pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_r=1HH15H17T4MS7YTA4REE

its an scc at £179 quid mind!

£269 is for the 1Gb RAM, 120 Gb disk with Windows XP version.

Try sorting by price and you'll see the A110L @ £198

£5 "new catalogue" discount and free delivery to a local store.

Tesco Direct, just like the Argos they are trying to emulate shows items sorted with the most expensive at the top!