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Those of you who have seen my previous laptop will surely remember it’s ridiculous dimensions. You see when I took my job with Canonical, I wasn’t sure how much travel there would be and since I had to give back all my hardware to my previous employer (whose generosity had prevented me from buying hardware for years) I decided to get the best bang of my money. The “desktop replacement” – since the term portable barely applied – I chose (an Acer Aspire 9303WSMi for the record) suited my needs wonderfully whilst stationary, but was somewhat lacking when I ventured beyond the reach of my power socket, or had to carry it for prolonged periods of time.

The size I could put up with, but the (lack of) battery life (I could get 45 minutes on a good day) was crippling, combined with the fact that under Ubuntu 9.04 it will lock up randomly, yet frequently requiring a power cycle to recover. After trying to figure it out for a while I gave up and bought a proper desktop instead.

Which works great, until you want to go somewhere…

Now, having a reasonably powered desktop means I couldn’t justify a powerful laptop. Nor did I want one. So once I finally tore myself away from the Apple Store a netbook seemed the sensible choice. However I had my concerns – the keyboard on my daughter’s EeePC (900A, for the record) was uncomfortable for anything besides hunt’n'peck typing unless you have really small – i.e. child sized – fingers, and the SSD seemed very slow, in turn making the device itself sluggish at times. Yet the battery life could not be ignored, so off I went searching for a better netbook.

My choices were narrowed down to the Samsung NC10, and the Compaq Mini 700. The former balanced it’s bland looks with phenomenal battery life of 6.5 hours, but it does seem to have some (at moment unresolvable) issues with Ubuntu regarding hibernation. Not great for a portable device. The latter looks gorgeous, has one of the best netbook keyboards I’ve tried, works almost flawlessly with Ubuntu, yet is let down by poorer battery life of just over 2 hours.

I was already leaning towards the Compaq, but I was convinced by recommendations from both friends and colleagues who have similar devices (it is, afterall, virtually the same as the HP Mini 1000).

Alongside the device itself, I also ordered a slipcase (since they chose not to include one), 2GB of RAM (it ships with 1GB, and officially cannot be upgraded, but it can), and a 6-cell battery. This battery, while considerably larger than the stock one, gives me 5-6 hours usage. My unscientific measurements show that it adds ~150g to the weight, and some bulk (but nothing compared to a 17″ laptop!), and it gives the netbook a nice tilt when used on a table.

Unsurprisingly, I installed Ubuntu immediately without even trying whatever was pre-installed. I went with 9.04 Netbook Remix, and personally I love the interface on the small screen. With the exception of the speakers, everything worked “out of the box”, and the speakers can be fixed with a little know how.

So far, very happy with it. Let’s see how it copes with two weeks work of travelling/work.