The Poser interface is a bit crowded on a netbook, but remains quite usable. I wouldn't recommend it for heavy graphics work, but it's a nice highly portable solution for playing around with Poser when away from a more powerful desktop or laptop.

The more I play around with a netbook, the more I question the need for getting a standard laptop in the future. For anybody who doesn't know, a netbook is a half-sized laptop that usually only weighs a pound or two. They're not as powerful as a standard laptop, but they excel in portability and that's essentially what a laptop is supposed to be all about.

Now that netbooks come with substantial hard drives (160 Gb on a lot of models) and Windows XP, they start heavily encroaching on laptop territory. I've installed Poser 5 and Microsoft Office on mine and both work fine. I decided to buy a nine inch model to get the smallest form factor for extra portability. The only downside with the smaller model is that it is the most difficult one to type on. I could get used to that if it weren't for one really dumb design choice for ASUS to put the "up arrow" key between the "?" and right shift key. I keep hitting that dumb "up arrow". The newest models fix this problem. I'm debating finding a program to let me reassign the keys if I cannot get used to the odd placement. Supposedly the ten inch models, which are an inch and a half wider, are more comfortable to type on. There's a tradeoff between losing a little portability for the extra width. ASUS, the first company to put out affordable netbooks, is supposed to be phasing out the nine inch models, so I wanted to get one of the last versions.

I've taken the netbook with me on travel and I cannot think of a reason to go back to lugging around a standard laptop with its extra weight and size. When I bring a laptop with me on travel, I'm not doing heavy typing. I'm mostly surfing the net and working on my Poser indexing (creating a visual index of my content for easy reference). For a person who wants to do heavy typing, either a slightly larger netbook or a laptop makes more sense. For everybody else, the simple portability of a netbook makes it a really great choice for an inexpensive portable computer.

My visual indexes of Poser content are at http://www.sharecg.com/pf/rgagnon