3 - More storage

High capacity SSDs please

The EeePC can be used as a portable media player – its better for movies than traditional devices thanks to the larger screen, and it can play a range of formats limited only by your choice of player and codecs (under Linux Smplayer can handle anything you throw at it). However, the small solid state drive that ships with the EeePC by default (a mere 4GB with the EeePC 701) can’t hold more than a few episodes of Lost, meaning you might need to rely on external or network storage.

SSDs have a number of advantages – they are silent, fast, and can take the rough handling that a netbook might receive. They use a lot less power than a typical hard disk, so help conserve the EeePC’s battery too. However, in terms of value per GB, they lose out to traditional laptop hard drives. One day, SSDs might offer the capacities that hard disks currently offer but for now it’s a trade-off between capacity and value or power saving and resilience.

Our perfect EeePC would have all of this – high capacities, low power use and the ability to sustain a few knocks while being good value for money. It sounds a lot to ask, but if SSDs drop in price significantly, it should become standard. The forthcoming X25-E SSD from Intel could be the perfect choice for netbooks, if it were only a bit cheaper.

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