This alternative Kindle, called the DX, is a super-size version of the popular Kindle 2, which arrived earlier this year. It sports a 9.7-inch screen, some 2.5 times as big as the surface area of the Kindle 2’s 6-inch display. It also sports a higher price tag — $489, versus $359 for its smaller sibling, which remains on the market.

Amazon’s Kindle DX

Like previous models, the Kindle DX allows you to shop for, and wirelessly download, any e-book in Amazon’s (AMZN) growing catalog — now about 275,000 titles. It uses the same easy-on-the-eyes screen technology as the smaller model but at a higher resolution. It still lacks color, and renders images only in gray scale. But the new DX adds a new capability: auto-rotation, which allows you to read in landscape mode.

This new, larger model isn’t primarily aimed at readers of standard books. It is targeted at three markets: textbooks, newspapers and other periodicals, and business documents in either Microsoft’s (MSFT) Word format or Adobe’s (ADBE) PDF format.

Unfortunately, I’ve been testing the Kindle DX and I didn’t like it nearly as much as the Kindle 2, which I own and enjoy using daily. While it performs its promised tasks adequately, I found that its size and weight made it awkward and tiring to hold for long periods of reading. It’s still fairly thin and light, but it’s 85% larger and heavier than the standard Kindle.

In addition, Amazon has degraded the user interface. To prevent the device from being even larger, the company had to remove the left-side page-turning buttons, confining all the controls to a vertical strip on the right. The keyboard at the bottom is also more vertically cramped.

If you’re left-handed, you have to spin the device around and rotate the screen to get buttons on the left, where they appear with their labels upside-down.

Similarly, if you choose to read in landscape mode, all the navigation controls, including the joystick for moving the cursor, will be awkwardly placed at either the top or bottom, far from where your hands are holding the device, and the keyboard essentially will be unusable.

In my view, the Kindle DX would have been a better product with on-screen touch controls that could instantly adapt to its size and orientation.

In reading standard books on the DX, I also encountered instances where the text on a page varied in shade from light gray to black.

I had mixed results with business documents. As with previous Kindles, you can either email personal documents to your device, for a fee, or drag them onto the Kindle via a cable, for free. But, unlike the smaller models, the new DX has PDF display capability built in, so it renders PDF files much more accurately than the older Kindles. That is a big improvement. It also allows you to view Excel and PowerPoint files if you save them in PDF format before sending them to your Kindle DX.

The Kindle DX, right, is a large-screen version of the popular Kindle e-reader, left.

I tried a variety of documents, and in many cases the results were great. The text was crisp, and the tables and graphics looked like they should. But I found that on some of these PDF documents, the text was too small to read. Yet, the Kindle lacks the ability to zoom in on PDF documents. You often can make the type larger by rotating to landscape mode, but this splits the PDFs into multiple pages, sometimes breaking them awkwardly.

Also, Amazon has raised its fees for converting and delivering business documents via email to all Kindles. The charge was formerly 10 cents a document. Now, it’s 15 cents per megabyte, which can add up if you load up your Kindle with lots of large documents. Most of my test documents, which were fairly small, cost over $1 each.

Newspapers looked about the same on the DX as they do on the smaller Kindles. Despite the larger screen, they don’t use traditional print or Web layouts, but a special Kindle layout that some users like a lot, but which I find annoying because it makes it harder to quickly scan multiple headlines.

The Kindle DX does have some nice touches. For the extra money, you not only get a larger screen, but also about twice the storage capacity. Also, because the screen is wider, you can adjust the margins on the DX, to obtain a line length that’s comfortable for your eyes and optimal for reading speed.

Amazon claims the same multiday battery life for the DX as for the Kindle 2. In my tests, I was able to go for several days of moderate reading without recharging, and much more if I turned off the wireless capability.

Although I wasn’t able to test college textbooks, I suspect they may be the killer app for this product. Many already are so expensive and heavy they could make the weight and price of the Kindle DX seem trivial in comparison.

But for standard books, I’d stick with the smaller, more comfortable Kindle 2.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

Linux on netbooks isn’t going away though. In fact, software and hardware companies have been making big investments to improve Linux netbooks. For the past week, I’ve been using several flavors of Linux running on netbooks — Ubuntu, Hewlett-Packard’s Mi (which is based on Ubuntu) and Moblin, created largely by Intel and not yet available commercially. In all cases, the Linux netbooks failed at some basic functions that any laptop, no matter how tiny and inexpensive, should be able to handle, like working with printers. At the same time, Mi and Moblin have impressive graphical user interfaces well-suited to the habits of typical netbook users, like checking email and accessing social-networking sites, as well as the small screens and low horsepower of tiny laptops. In addition to Linux, all of the computers shared the standard features, or lack thereof, common among netbooks, including compact keyboards and no DVD drives.

H-P’s Mini 110 Mi Edition

The most polished of the products was H-P’s Mini 110 Mi Edition, a new model with a 10.1-inch screen that H-P will begin selling on its Web site for $279.99 on June 10. That’s nearly $50 less than what H-P will charge for the Mini 110 running Windows XP, which will come with a 160-gigabyte hard drive instead of the 8-gigabyte solid-state drive that will come with the Mi edition.

The striking thing about this netbook is the slick graphical user interface created by H-P that runs on top of Ubuntu and first began appearing on H-P netbooks early this year. Instead of a traditional desktop like that found in Windows and the Mac, Mi (pronounced “me”) arranges commonly used applications and content on a screen called the “dashboard,” which looks like a personalized Web page and lists recently received emails, fresh thumbnail images of favorite Web sites, and a Web-search toolbar.

The Mi home screen is a clever way to make the computer seem alive with on- and off-line content, which is fitting since netbooks are designed for on-the-go Internet activities. It’s also tailor-made for the small screen size of netbooks.

A more eye-catching iteration of Linux is Moblin, which I tried out in test form on an Acer netbook; it is expected to ship on netbooks by the end of the year. Moblin has a menu of icons at the top of the screen, the most interesting of which leads to the M-Zone, a home screen that displays calendar appointments and favorite applications alongside snapshots of recently visited sites and a continuous feed from the user’s Twitter network.

An icon called “People” leads to a list of instant-messaging buddies, while another, called “Zones,” let me organize all the applications I had launched into different virtual workspaces, which is useful for hopping between various tasks on a small-screen device like a netbook.

The look and feel of the standard Ubuntu system, without the Mi interface, is more commonplace. I tried out a Dell Mini 10 with a 10.1-inch display and 160-gigabyte hard drive that sells for $349 on Dell’s Web site. The Mini 10 ships with version 8.04 of Ubuntu, which resembles Windows XP, with its desktop, taskbar and pop-up menu system. Ubuntu, in some cases, seemed to overestimate the size of the Dell Mini’s display: A window for configuring wireless-networking capabilities was so large it bled off the screen, and I couldn’t access all the buttons on it. I also installed on the Dell a new version of Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which works better on small screens. Since a Windows XP version of the Dell Mini 10 sells for the same price as the Ubuntu, I can’t see a compelling reason to choose the Ubuntu option.

All the netbooks I tried had compatibility problems with other external devices. The netbooks couldn’t load the software drivers to let me print to my Canon and Dell printers. I couldn’t load pictures over a USB cable from my Canon PowerShot SD750 digital camera. I was able to get my pictures on the machines by plugging a storage card from my camera directly into the netbooks.

Canonical, the London company that oversees development work on Ubuntu, says it is improving the system’s compatibility with various devices. Intel says it is unfair to judge Moblin until it is commercially available.

Some key applications currently don’t run on Linux, like Apple’s iTunes, which makes it difficult to load music files onto iPods from the netbooks. While the Linux laptops didn’t run Microsoft Office, they came with OpenOffice, a free package of word-processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications that allowed me to open and modify basic Word and Excel files.

The companies behind Linux netbooks have made great strides in improving user interfaces, but until they can achieve similar breakthroughs in how the machines work with other devices, Windows netbooks are still a better deal.

• Email nick.wingfield@wsj.com. Walter S. Mossberg is away and will return next Thursday.

This week, the company released the Kindle 2, a new version that is much thinner, a tad lighter and a bit taller. It has much more built-in memory, better navigation controls and a slightly improved screen. I’ve been testing the Kindle 2 for a few weeks and consider it a vast improvement over the first Kindle, released in late 2007, which was clumsy and annoying to use. Overall, I found the Kindle 2 to be a well-designed, satisfying piece of hardware.

The new model carries the same relatively high $359 price tag as its predecessor, but it offers faster page rendering and 25% better battery life. The catalog of books available on both Kindles has now swelled from about 90,000 in 2007 to over 230,000 today, and titles still typically cost around $10. You can still subscribe to periodicals and blogs, and there is still a crude Web browser built in — but this gadget is mainly for reading books.

Like its predecessor, the new Kindle has a built-in cellular wireless modem that allows you to download books or update periodicals on the fly, without using a computer. As before, there is no monthly fee for this wireless service.

Most important, Amazon (AMZN) has remedied the most irritating flaws of the original model. It’s no longer easy to accidentally turn pages, because the page-turning buttons have been redesigned. You no longer have to reach around to the back of the device to turn it on or off. You no longer scroll through menus and text with an odd little wheel whose progress was only visible in a thermometer-like strip separate from the main window. And the book-like cover no longer falls off.

But the improvements in this dedicated e-book reader, while admirable, may pale beside Amazon’s next move. Amazon says it is working to make the Kindle e-book catalog available on other mobile devices, such as smart phones, that people already own. The online merchant, which is so secretive it makes Steve Jobs seem like Joe Biden, isn’t saying which devices will get the Kindle service or when. I would bet it will be sooner rather than later.

Amazon’s Kindle 2

This makes perfect sense. While the Kindle project has often been compared with Apple’s iPod, because both are hardware devices seamlessly connected to online-content stores, there is a fundamental difference. Apple (AAPL) offers content to sell hardware. Amazon offers the Kindle to sell content.

If, say, this electronic content were available not only on the Kindle reader, but via Kindle software apps on Apple’s iPhone or the BlackBerry, the e-book market could explode.

Meanwhile, Kindle’s design has gone from chunky and clunky to smooth and sleek. The power switch is now easily reachable on top of the device, and the all-important buttons for paging forward and backward through a book are now smaller — and work by pushing them firmly inward toward the screen instead of outward toward the edge of the device. This means they can no longer be easily activated by stray finger movements.

The weird thermometer system has been replaced by a little joystick that moves an on-screen cursor. The Home button is now large, and has been moved off the keyboard, which has been reduced in size, but is still quite usable.

The screen is the same 6-inch, high-resolution E-Ink display, which has a comforting contrast ratio for reading and uses battery power only when you turn the page. But, while it still can’t display color and still can’t be read in the dark, its gray-shade graphics are much more detailed.

The battery is now sealed in, but it is larger. Amazon claims you can read for four or five days with the wireless turned on, or up to two weeks with it turned off. In my tests, those claims proved true. I took the Kindle on a trip for a week with the wireless turned off and the battery indicator barely budged.

Memory has been greatly expanded, so you can store 1,500 books, up from 200, though you can no longer add extra memory.

There are also a few cool new features. The Kindle 2 looks up words in the dictionary automatically, as soon as you move the cursor to them. It can optionally read books aloud in a computer voice that’s surprisingly decent. And, if the wireless function is on, the Kindle service will remember the last page you read in a book and synchronize a second Kindle to that same place in the book.

There are some drawbacks. You still can’t organize your books into groups of your choice. Amazon now charges $29 for the cover, which was formerly free. And the Kindle still doesn’t work with some of the open e-book formats that other devices support.

But for serious book readers who are tired of toting around stacks of books and periodicals, the new Kindle is finally a pleasure to use.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20090225/amazons-kindle-2-improves-the-good-leaves-out-the-bad/feed/ 4 http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20090211/sonys-vaio-p-has-sportscar-looks-without-the-power/ http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20090211/sonys-vaio-p-has-sportscar-looks-without-the-power/#comments Thu, 12 Feb 2009 02:08:03 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20090211/sonys-vaio-p-has-sportscar-looks-without-the-power/ Of the most famous computer makers, only two, Apple and Sony, primarily aim their products at consumers, instead of the generally conservative IT departments of big companies. So, it’s no surprise that these two tech giants often turn out especially stylish and daring hardware designs.

But Sony (SNE), unlike Apple (AAPL), isn’t especially skilled at software and doesn’t make its own operating system. This situation partly explains why Sony’s latest gorgeous, daring laptop, the shockingly tiny Vaio P, turns heads everywhere, but is pretty frustrating to use.

I love the look and feel and boldness of the design, but can’t recommend this sleek machine for most users because it is very slow and has poor battery life. Oh, and it sells for double or triple the price of other small laptops, commonly called netbooks.

The Vaio P is mainly undone because it comes with Vista Home Premium, the edition of Windows that is sluggish and a memory hog. Most competing small notebooks ship with the more nimble, but older, Windows XP. And the Vista problem is made worse by the processor inside the machine, which is an especially slow version of the Intel (INTC) Atom chip often used in netbooks.

While I was testing the Vaio P, which costs between $900 and $1,500, nearly everyone who saw it asked to try it. That’s because it doesn’t look like any other laptop I’ve seen. It’s long, narrow and very thin — with roughly the same footprint as one of those plastic folders waiters use to bring you the check at a restaurant. It can be tucked into the pocket of an overcoat or a pair of cargo pants, and comes in several handsome colors.

Sony’s Vaio P “lifestyle” computer

These unusual dimensions allow for only a small eight-inch screen, which is much wider than it is tall. But the Vaio P’s screen boasts very high resolution, so that it can display almost as much of a typical Web page or document as the more common 13.3-inch screens on larger laptops.

Sony also has done a great job with the keyboard on the Vaio P. Its keys are surprisingly large and well-spaced for such a tiny computer, with a wide space bar, and large “Enter” and “Backspace” keys. Instead of a touch pad, it uses a midkeyboard pointing stick.

And this little laptop is packed with nice features, including a built-in 3G cellular modem to supplement its Wi-Fi and free GPS for mapping. The P also comes standard with two gigabytes of memory. The $900 base model comes with a small 60-gigabyte hard disk; and the $1,200 midrange model has a 64-gigabyte solid state drive — which is more durable and uses less power. The top model, at $1,500, comes with a more reasonably sized 128-gigabyte solid state drive.

There are two USB ports, but the Ethernet and external video ports are relegated to a little module that snaps on to the power adapter. All models come with a quick-start system that brings up a stripped-down Web browser and media player without waiting for Windows to load. This is a boon, but it’s crudely designed.

Sony positions the Vaio P as a “lifestyle” computer, a companion to your main computer that’s almost as portable as a smart phone, but can do more. Unfortunately, once you actually start using it, that promise is dashed by its awful performance.

In my tests of the Vaio P, programs launched painfully slowly, delays were common and start-up and reboot times were glacial. I timed a reboot at nearly four minutes, and had to give up on an attempt to open 15 Web sites simultaneously in tabs in the usually speedy Firefox Web browser. Video playback was choppy.

There are some other problems that can’t be blamed on Vista. The speakers are worse than those on some cellphones. And the tiny mouse buttons are so close to the bottom edge of the keyboard that they are easy to hit accidentally. Also, I couldn’t get the GPS to work.

Using my tough battery test, in which I turn off all power-saving features, I got less than two hours, even on a solid-state model, suggesting a typical battery life of maybe 2.5 hours. Sony sells a double-sized battery, but it adds a bit of weight and bulk to the sleek box, and costs $129.

I also tested two experimental configurations of the Vaio P, which show that there’s hope for it in the future. One of these models had been tweaked by Sony to turn off many of Vista’s performance-sapping and power-hungry features. This box ran better, though still not great. Sony plans to offer a software download that will make these tweaks automatically.

Much better was a Vaio P with the forthcoming version of Windows, called Windows 7, installed. This version of Windows, likely to ship by this fall, made the Vaio P perform acceptably, despite its wimpy processor. Everything was much snappier, and reboot times were cut in half.

The Vaio P may be a beautiful device that’s just ahead of its time. Even if you can afford it, I’d advise waiting for the version with Windows 7.

• Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20090211/sonys-vaio-p-has-sportscar-looks-without-the-power/feed/ 0 http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20081217/friends-and-family-have-a-new-way-to-just-drop-in/ http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20081217/friends-and-family-have-a-new-way-to-just-drop-in/#comments Thu, 18 Dec 2008 02:18:03 +0000 Nick Wingfield http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20081217/friends-and-family-have-a-new-way-to-just-drop-in/ Digital-picture frames have started to take off as a way for people to show off their stashes of digital photos in rotating slide shows. A growing number of frames even connect to wireless home networks so they can easily be refreshed with photos stored online and on PCs.

But keeping those types of digital-photo frames up-to-date with new pictures demands more technical skill than many parents and grandparents are likely to have. It requires, for example, rudimentary knowledge of how to configure a home Wi-Fi network or shuttle storage cards between a frame and a digital camera. Still, digital frames are a great way to keep generations in touch with, say, a far-flung child’s latest ballet recital or a football game.

Just in time for the holidays, the wireless carrier T-Mobile is selling a digital-photo frame that makes it easy to set up and to keep fresh. While I found the Cameo excels in its simplicity, it comes with a number of annoying drawbacks and a pricing model that will limit its appeal. It sells for a reasonable $99.99 in T-Mobile stores, but carries a hefty $9.99 monthly fee.

Still, Cameo is an exciting first edition of a product.

First, its strengths. The picture frame is as easy to operate as a cellphone, containing some of the same technical innards of a wireless handset. And each Cameo has a unique phone number, just like a cellphone, that lets anyone who knows the number to “dial” it up — sending messages containing digital photographs instead of voice calls.

Setting up Cameo is as easy as taking it out of a box, screwing a stick into the back to prop up the frame and plugging it into an electrical outlet. The Cameo has a seven-inch color display and one of the more attractive borders I’ve seen on a digital photo frame: imitation black leather with white stitching.

Users themselves can manually load images onto the frame from a PC by connecting it through a USB cable or by inserting a miniature storage card from a digital camera.

Cameo can receive pictures wirelessly two ways. The owner of the frame hands out the Cameo’s phone number to friends and family members, who then send pictures to the frame that were taken with the cameras standard on most modern cellphones. This method uses MMS, or multimedia messaging service, a communications standard normally used to share pictures and other media between cellphones.

Cameo owners also can give out an email address for their picture frames that is based on their Cameo’s phone number, allowing people to email images that they’ve downloaded to their computers from digital cameras.

The first time the frame receives a picture from an email address or phone number, Cameo asks the frame owner to push a button on the back of the frame to place the sender on an approved list. After that, all images from the approved source appear automatically on the frame — a method that at least keeps random people’s photos from popping up in grandma’s living room.

There’s a wonderful unpredictability to how Cameo works. Imagine all of the kids and grandkids in a sprawling family room in different locations being able to send snapshots to each other. This is possible now with photo-sharing sites like Flickr, but those typically require going to a Web site. Images on a Cameo just show up without warning on your kitchen countertop, living room or office desk.

I handed out my Cameo number to some colleagues and was delighted when their cameraphone pictures began trickling into my frame, including a shot of the New York neighborhood in which one of them lives, and an image of another colleague ice skating.

The Cameo’s screen, featuring 720×480 pixels, isn’t the highest-resolution digital photo frame on the market, but the pictures looked fine to me. You can do a slide show for any number of images, chose a fade-out or other transition, change the order of the photos and alter the display speed — holding a single image for up to an hour.

Unfortunately, the frame has a skimpy 64 megabytes of memory, and storage capacity isn’t expandable. There is enough room for only about 200 photos at maximum size. Once it’s full, you have to make room by manually deleting photos.

Another problem is that the frame currently is available only to existing T-Mobile cellular subscribers.

By far, the biggest turnoff is the monthly fee for the cellular service that delivers the pictures to the frame. There’s no limit on how many pictures can be sent to a Cameo under T-Mobile’s cellular plan, but $120 a year is a steep price.

The carrier says it will consider other pricing options in the future. Until it does, it’s going to be tough for most people to buy the Cameo, even for a beloved family member.

Walt Mossberg is on vacation.

Write to Nick Wingfield at nick.wingfield@wsj.com

]]> http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20081217/friends-and-family-have-a-new-way-to-just-drop-in/feed/ 2 http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20081105/netbooks-come-into-their-own/ http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20081105/netbooks-come-into-their-own/#comments Thu, 06 Nov 2008 02:10:04 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20081105/netbooks-come-into-their-own/ Somewhere between the laptop and the smart phone, the computer industry has long believed there could be a small, low-cost device that would please consumers and sell well.

The device would be more versatile than, say, an iPhone, but much cheaper and more portable than, say, a ThinkPad. The trouble is, every attempt to create such a category of computer has met with failure — until now.

This year, that in-between type of computer now called a “netbook” has finally caught on. Since I reviewed a pioneering model, the 7-inch, $300 Asus Eee PC back in January, the market has been flooded with new and better, if somewhat more expensive, netbook models. Nearly every company — from big names such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard, to obscure ones like MSI — has jumped into the fray.

Netbooks still constitute a smaller niche than laptops and the exploding smart phone, or hand-held computer, category. But they are threatening to break into the mainstream in a big way, especially in an economic climate where a low price and fewer bells and whistles are suddenly more attractive.

They are much more portable than most standard laptops. They are easier to use on a plane or carry around town. And they are way cheaper, between $300 and $500, than the very lightest, thinnest standard laptops, which often top $1,000.

Compared with even an amazingly powerful pocket device, like the iPhone, the Google (GOOG) G1, or the forthcoming BlackBerry Storm, a netbook, at about twice the price, offers a much larger keyboard and screen. And they can run far more sophisticated software and perform a much wider variety of computing tasks.

But netbooks come with serious compromises. While they are great for light use on the go, their cramped screens and keyboards, and slow processors, make them much less potent and less comfortable to use than even a so-called ultraportable laptop. And, as small as they are, they can’t fit in a pocket like smart phones can, be as easily used as a still camera, or function as a cellphone.

Netbooks aren’t tablets. They look and act like regular clamshell-style laptops with keyboards and track pads, but are much smaller. Most current models have 8.9-inch screens, though some now sport 10-inch displays. Dell (DELL) is even planning soon to launch a netbook with a 12-inch screen for around $600, which will blur the line with traditional laptops, some of which can be bought for less with larger displays.

Compared with sleek, thin, but much costlier notebooks, such as the Apple (AAPL) MacBook Air or the Lenovo ThinkPad X300, the netbooks of today are stubbier and chunkier. But they take up much less room on an airline tray table. When the person in front of you reclines, you can happily keep using them, because their screens are so much smaller and extend upward so much less.

The early netbook models relied on the unfamiliar and somewhat geeky Linux operating system, and most still offer it as an option. But many now also can be purchased with Windows XP, with which consumers are far more experienced, and which can run many more well-known programs.

At the start of this year, most netbooks lacked hard disks, instead offering very limited storage via memory chips — often less storage than a $199 iPhone. They were pitched as limited devices mainly meant for using the Internet — thus the name “netbook” — and their makers assumed users mainly would use Web-based applications.

Now, many offer decent-size hard disks and include serious programs, such as Microsoft (MSFT) Office or Microsoft Works. But none offers a built-in DVD drive, which makes it hard to install some new software.

To offer readers a feel for today’s netbooks, I selected four representative models to test and review. I am not declaring these four as the best on the market, nor do I mean to slight makers like H-P, whose entries aren’t included in this review. The truth is, there are far more similarities than differences among competing netbooks that might make one model stand out from the others.

All four of the models I tested use Intel’s new low-power Atom processor. All have decent screen resolution — much better than the original Asus. But none can display a full Web page, or even most of a Web page, without scrolling. Each has three USB ports.

Three of the four have good battery life, but getting good power in most models means using a larger battery that adds weight and bulk.

All of my test models ran XP, not Linux, because I believe that’s the better choice for average consumers.

Here are minireviews of these four netbooks.

Acer Aspire One: The $349 blue Acer One weighs a little over two pounds with its standard battery, and has a bright, sharp 8.9-inch screen. It comes with a 120-gigabyte hard disk and 1 gigabyte of memory. It’s a little over an inch thick, and its footprint is much smaller than that of a standard sheet of paper.

As on all the other models, I tried a word processor, either Microsoft Word or Works, and several popular non-Microsoft programs: Adobe Reader, Apple’s iTunes and Mozilla’s Firefox browser. The Acer handled all of them well, though, as with all the other netbooks I tried, its speakers are mediocre.

The Acer’s small keyboard is very nicely done. Its keys are large enough, and separated and sculpted enough, to make typing comfortable and accurate, though I wouldn’t want to write a novel on it.

But the Acer has two big drawbacks. Its battery life is miserable. On my tough battery test, where I turn off all power-saving features, crank up the screen brightness, turn on the Wi-Fi, and play a continuous loop of music, it couldn’t even squeeze out two hours. In normal use, that might mean 2½ hours. To fix that problem, you can spend $50 more on a version with a double-size battery, at the cost of added weight and bulk. This costlier version also boosts the hard disk to 160 gigabytes.

The other problem, which can’t be fixed with any factory options, is that the Acer One has a terrible track pad. It’s too cramped vertically for comfortable use, and the buttons, which are mere slivers, are arranged on the sides instead of below the pad. Moving the cursor or selecting text is awkward and inaccurate.

Lesser problems are that the Acer includes only the older, slower, “G” flavor of Wi-Fi and a low-resolution Webcam.

The Dell Mini 9 has an 8.9-inch screen, is compact and has a big battery, but it lacks a hard disk and offers just 8 gigabytes of flash memory.

Dell Mini 9: Like the less costly Acer, the $399 Dell Mini has an 8.9-inch screen, but it’s a bit narrower horizontally. Its standard battery is larger, making it slightly heavier but still very light.

The Dell is a throwback to the older concept of netbooks. It lacks a hard disk and offers just 8 gigabytes of flash memory, plus 2 gigabytes of free online storage. It has just half a gigabyte of memory. For extra money, you can double the flash storage and memory.

Because of its bigger battery, and its lack of a power-sucking hard disk, the Dell beat the Acer handily in my battery test, getting just under three hours, which means that, in normal use, you would likely see four hours.

The Dell has the same wimpy Wi-Fi and Webcam as the Acer. But its track pad, while small, is much larger vertically and easier to use, with buttons where you expect to find them. It ran all my test software OK.

However, the Dell had by far the worst keyboard in my test group. Because of its compact width, the tab, arrow and other keys are squeezed to a ridiculously narrow size that impedes typing.

MSI Wind U100: This is a $399 machine (after a recent price cut) with a 10-inch screen, and comes from a Taiwan company better known in the U.S. for making computer components than entire computers. The model I tested, with a double-size battery, is $429. My test unit was white, weighed a tad over three pounds, and had 1 gigabyte of memory and a 160-gigabyte hard disk.

Despite the larger screen, the Wind still fits very well on a cramped airline tray, and it has a well-designed keyboard. It comes with a button that can slow down or speed up the processor to save battery life or add oomph. And there’s a function that can magnify portions of text.

It has a standard, decent Webcam and can use the newest “N” flavor of Wi-Fi. It ran all my test software just fine.

With my test model’s bigger battery, which protrudes from the bottom, the Wind did very well on my test at its standard processor speed, lasting three hours and 37 minutes. That suggests you could get four to five hours in normal use. Presumably, the standard model with the smaller battery would get half of that life, though you could stretch it by stepping down the processor speed.

Overall, I liked the MSI Wind a lot. My only real gripe is that the track pad is small and has only a single thin button, which performs a left or right click. This button is too small and sluggish for optimal use.

Asus Eee 1000H: Asus, another Taiwan company known as a component maker, is the king of netbooks. In fact, it has so many different, and frequently changing, netbook models that its product lineup can be a blur. The one I tested has a 10-inch screen and costs $475, making it the costliest netbook in this group. It’s also the heaviest, edging out my test Wind slightly.

Like the Wind, my Eee 1000H had a large battery that protruded from the bottom. It doesn’t come with a smaller battery. Also like the Wind, it has a standard Webcam, the faster “N” Wi-Fi, and a 160-gigabyte hard disk with 1 gigabyte of memory.

The keyboard on the 1000H was the best of this lot, with well-designed keys. It also had the roomiest and most functional track pad, though its buttons — integrated with a metal border around the track pad — took some getting used to.

The Asus, like the Wind, has the capability to tweak the speed of its processor. It also has a button that can change the screen resolution, though I found that the nonstandard resolutions looked distorted.

In my battery test, at its standard processor speed, the 1000H got three hours and 32 minutes, suggesting that in normal use it could deliver between four and five hours — more if you use the lower processor speed.

The Asus handled all my test software well. It comes with a greater variety of built-in programs than the others and offers 20 gigabytes of free online storage.

Bottom line: If you want a machine for light use, a light price and a light weight, a netbook is waiting and is worth a try. Just don’t expect the same experience as on a standard laptop or the convenience of a smart phone.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

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