With all of the hype surrounding tablets it’s almost getting hard not to forget about netbooks. However, for some users (enterprising ones in particular) a tablet just won’t substititue for a full fledged mini laptop. Luckily, hardware manufacters relaize this and have not abandoned the netbook form factor just yet.

In fact just today HP has come forth to show off the Mini 1103 business minded netbook. This 10.1-inch netbook comes complete with an Intel Atom N455 or N475 processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 3 or 6 cell battery. In terms of operating systems you have Windows 7 Starter, FreeDOS OS and SUSE Linux sto choose from.

While none of these hardware features are exactly ground breaking the Mini 1103 does clock in at just $299 making it the perfect business oriented netbook.

via hp

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You may have heard some news of late about the Augen Genbook 74, the smartbook part of Augen’s recent offerings that are both powered by Google’s Android OS and are able to access the Android Market app stores.  They’re only available in K-Mart stores, you understand, and thus fairly hard to find.

I found one, and now, you’re getting a review.  And I’ll say this much, the only good thing about me buying this miserable scrap heap of a netbook is that K-Mart has a ninety day return policy.

The Augen Genbook 74 netbook offers up a seven inch LCD monitor, a 400 MHz CPU, a hundred and twenty eight meg of RAM, Wi-Fi and Ethernet access, three USB ports, a microphone jack and a speaker jack.

Almost from the word go, things went wrong with this netbook.  The screen started out locked, demanding I press the “menu” key to unlock it.  Sure enough, no key on the keyboard bears the name “menu”.  I eventually discovered it was a key that looked like writing on a page but that’s hardly fair.  I began to use the netbook, with its horribly cramped control scheme much like the earlier Augen we discussed from Geeks.com, and got regular signal errors coming off my normally stable broadband.  I didn’t use Wi-Fi, either, I used ETHERNET.  An actual cable connection was unstable. And lest you blame the cable I’m using it right now, have been for weeks, without incident. Access to the Android Market was fraught with errors, requiring me to reconnect on a regular basis.  And perhaps the worst of it was how HOT the stupid thing got–fifteen minutes of being plugged in left the AC adapter HOT TO THE TOUCH.

Like Fry once snarled in an episode of Futurama, “That dog won’t hunt, Monsignor.”

The only good thing to say about this is its relatively low price tag–at a hundred bucks, it’s pretty cheap.  It’s just too bad that it’s completely useless.

The Augen Genbook 74 has virtually no redeeming features aside from the fact that it may one day be a collectible because no one will keep this malfunctioning piece of garbage one second longer than they have to.

The Good

Possible collector value

The Bad

Everything else

Score 1 / 10