Personally, I don't need a flashy netbook. I'm a student and all I need is something that's small, has decent battery life, has an office suite and basic web browsing capabilities with 802.11b/g support. I don't need it to run Crysis. I have a beefy and expensive desktop for that. I can stick this in my backpack, pull it out at any hotspot and be working on a paper or lab report in under a minute.

A note about this netbook. There's a factory in China which is responsible for making this and many other nearly identical netbooks which are rebranded for various countries. They originally came with a proprietary Linux-based OS which was very, very limited. The newer ones seem to be mostly Windows CE 5.0/6.0, which means you have access to a large library of software created for the WinCE OS. The specs of these machines can run the gamut from 266 MHz to 400 Mhz, with a SSD of 1Gb to 4Gb and ram from 64 Mb to 256 Mb, with 128 Mb being far more common. Some of the earlier ones either do not have wireless capability or are 802.11 b only, so beware.

If you're looking for something with more horsepower to it, you can find some good deals on refurbished lower-end Asus Eee PCs for around $200. The Acer Aspire One at Office Max ended up being $300 on Black Friday.