The Netbook war has finally begun!

As much as I love Netbooks, the market has becomes saturated with countless similar products that do not inspire much. Everyone including Acer, Asus, Lenovo, Samsung, Fujitsu, Dell, MSI and other smaller companies such as ECS have decided that Netbooks are the future.

All these companies use either a 9 or a 10 inch screen and sport the Intel Atom chip clocked at 1.6Ghz. You either get 512MB or 1 Gig of Ram and either comes with a Linux distribution or Windows XP. It is also important to mention that some Netbook’s use SSD memory while others use traditional spinning hard drives.

Things have been quite bland with the companies releasing new Netbook’s every week at very similar price points and very little that differentiated these devices.

Finally though there’s a reason to get excited about the products again. The brewing Netbook war her begun with prices finally being slashed and product lines expanded.

MSI, who always had competitive pricing, started the fight by now offering a 120 gig hard drive as opposed their original 80 gig. This prompted Acer to lower the prices of their “Aspire One” Netbook by $50 on every different version they have which meant they could offer a Netbook for a mere $329. While this model only offers an 8Gig flash hard drive it’s still excellent value for money as the Aspire One offers two slots for expandable memory.

In a response, Asus (the founders of the Netbook genre) decided to drop pricing on their two flagship models. The 9-inch, 901 series dropped a massive $100 and is now down to $499 and the 10-inch, 1000H series is down to just $449. Considering the 1000H started out at $649 it’s a huge drop over the last two months. The reason the 1000H is cheaper as it only has an 80 gig hard drive while the 901 series have more expensive flash memory.

All in all, the consumer is about to become a lot happier and if you’ve been holding off buying a Netbook then I recommend you hold off just a little longer and you’ll get a major bargain once these companies start dropping prices even further.

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