blogstrapping

[OT] Laptop Boots on Amazon

I have been thinking about buying a new laptop soon. I made the mistake of buying a refurbished laptop not too long ago, and while it still works pretty well the thing has started giving me subtle hints that the screen might go out soon. Rather than buy a parts laptop to cannibalize the screen for this thing, and pray something else (or maybe the "new" screen) will not die shortly after, I have decided to just shop around to see if I can get my hands on something new that would suit me well.

I have been looking into the possibility of getting a tablet/netbook device, one of those small form factor laptop things with a screen that can flip around and lie flat, display-out, so that the netbook becomes a tablet PC. I am a little concerned about some things, though:

  1. I tend to dislike touchpads quite a lot.
  2. I care about keyboard feel when typing, and a lot of laptops (let alone netbooks) have terrible keyboards. ThinkPad keyboards are a glaring exception to the norm.
  3. I need to be able to run FreeBSD or OpenBSD on it (maybe NetBSD, PC-BSD, or DesktopBSD, in a pinch), with good power management support (specifically suspend/resume that works properly) and all the standard hardware working (including the tablet display, the wireless card, et cetera). Does Flash work on OpenBSD?

I think that about sums it up. I suppose I could test out touchpads and keyboards in stores before buying anything, but it would be a little more difficult to test a BSD Unix install.

I guess the closest this comes to being on-topic for blogstrapping, aside from the generally technical subject matter, is that I want to be able to use it as a development platform, as well as a Web browser and a PDF reader. That should not require much, of course. I have no need for stuff like Visual Studio, Eclipse, or KDevelop; Unix is my IDE. Since I use Vim as my programming editor, though, I need a decent keyboard.

I received an email from Amazon yesterday with the subject line "Amazon.com: ASUS Eee PC T101MT-EU17-BK 10.1-Inch Convertible Tablet Netbook (Black)". I decided to check it out, so I used a URL in the email to go look at the page for that product. This image is what I saw:

At first, I was confused, but it all very quickly began to make sense: this is how a netbook looks when it boots . . . on (an) Amazon. It has all become clear to me now. Hallelujah.

I guess that is a good looking netbook, if you're into that kind of thing.

In case you want to see the page for yourself (and maybe buy the product): ASUS Eee PC T101MT-EU17-BK 10.1-Inch Convertible Tablet Netbook (Black). It may not look the same by the time you visit the page, unless you get to it soon, but if you are in the market for a tablet netbook it might still be a useful link for you.