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By David Rothman

image Strange. CrunchGear has published an anti-netbook guide to netbooks—with a title that makes you think the guide will be genuinely helpful.

image Trouble is, CrunchGear taints the guide with mentions of laptops as as pricey as $1,998 and of the four gizmos written up, just one is below $500, the $349 Lenovo Ideapad S10-2. Bait and switch?

What’s going on? Netbooks aren’t for, say, graphics designer or demanding gamers. Rather they’re great as second computers for Web-browsing, email—and, yes, e-books.

I generally favor the tablet form factor for e-booking, but hybrid netbooks exist: laptop-tablet combos. Check out the $499 hybrid from Asus, the Eee PC T91, which includes a touch screen.

Back to CrunchGear

image Meanwhile some CrunchGear commenters think that that the blog is looking out for the interests of TechCrunch, of which it’s an offshoot. TechCrunch’s owner, Michael Arrington, is behind the CrunchPad Web tablet that may well be competing somewhat with the combos as their prices drop. Is this the reason, as at least one commenter wonders? I dunno. Maybe the CrunchGear writer is just falling for propaganda from hardware vendors worried about the thin margins of netbooks.

Normally I find both CrunchGear and TechCrunch to be useful. I’d love to know the real reason why CrunchGear is so off target.

By the way, I’m crazy about my Acer Aspire One which I picked up for $200 refurbished. It’s especially handy for touring public domain sites and quickly downloading and reading samples from titles of possible interest.

 
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