Netbook Or iPad - What Does $500 Buy?

Comparing the two categories may sound a bit forced to some people, but there is a system to the madness. Since most netbooks are cheaper than $499, the price of an iPad, it makes a lot of sense to put them against each other.

Netbooks have been around for quite a while now, 3 whole years actually, a lot of time to hone everything to perfection, which Asus has done apparently. In the other corner iPad is relatively lonely in its category, being the only real tablet that can be used without applying several hacks just to get through the day.

Netbooks have the distinctive benefit from the three years they've spent on the market without real contenders. When you buy a netbook you know exactly what it is you're actually buying; a screen 10 or 12 inches big, a reasonable set of chips to get you through the daily tasks, and a keyboard to tell the computer what it needs to know.

On the other hand iPad, the tablet has a lot of proving to do. It has been on the shelves for a month, most parts of the world haven't seen it sold through official channels either. There are lots of expectations to live up to and the hardware is very thin to do that. Maybe it's the software that does the majority of the work?

On netbooks you can run basically any operating system the hardware can take, and the x86 architecture has seen a few decades go by. What it means is that it runs all versions of Windows including XP, Vista and 7, and I'm fairly confident to say that you could get a Windows 98 running if you were determined enough.

IPad runs its own variation of Apple's operating system. It's a far cousin of the OSX and basically the thing you see on an iPhone. Or iPod touch, to be more precise. The hardware is under seven locks, but it is supposedly an ARM based technology, which means there is not going to be a way to run anything you like.

You get iPhone OS whether you like it or not. Not that it's a bad thing; Apple has hit the nail on the head when it allowed iPad to run all iPhone applications. That means more than a hundred thousand different apps available through apple store, well done!

Netbooks get to have a physical QWERTY keyboard that comes really handy when you need to create content or answer a great deal of e-mails. The product from Apple puts a virtual keyboard in front of you that may seem like a great way to put in text, but once you are at the level of 70 words per minute, dropping back to 15 is not a great option.

Without accessories iPad is just a fancy way of updating your Facebook status, but netbooks are not the computing powerhouse some people would like to see them either.

Thank you for reading my article and I hope you enjoyed it.

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