The folks at CTL were kind enough to send me a 2Go PC convertible netbook/tablet to play with for the next few days. I’ll have a full review soon, but after playing with the computer for a few hours, I wanted to share a few initial thoughts: Con: The keyboard is awfully small and takes some getting used to. This probably isn’t a huge problem for the target audience: children, but if you need a large keyboard this may not be the computer for you.

New York-based retailer J&R has posted product pages for the soon-to-be-released 10.1 inch Acer Asprie One netbook. And despite initial reports that the computer could cost between $400 and $600 overseas, it looks like J&R expects to sell the netbook for just under $350, which makes me feel a lot better about the rumors that Acer could phase out its 8.9 inch netbook and replace it with the new model.

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All of the information I’ve seen about the new Acer Aspire One netbook with a 10 inch screen has indicated that the laptop will have a 160GB hard drive and run Windows XP. And according to ZDNet, that’s true of the first generation models that should be hitting the shelves in mid-February.

… the ads have almost nothing to do with the product. HP has launched a new TV ad for the HP Mini 1000 that could almost be an ad for a clothing store. Because the commercial shows more than half a dozen outfit changes, but only shows the netbook being advertised for a few seconds.The gist is that you can use HP’s mini laptop with “big keys and a large screen” to chat with your friends, write blog posts, or keep up with the news on the go.

I think if you ask most of the people who read this blog regularly, they’ll tell you that a netbook is a small, light, and low cost computer. But companies that make a lot of money by selling state of the art computer components have a tendency to say that netbooks don’t work very well as computers. The latest person with a vested interest in making you believe that is NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, who tells Laptop magazine that mini-laptops with the Intel Atom processor don’t run “anything well” from Electronic Arts, Adobe, or Microsoft.

While plenty of folks will try to tell you that mini-laptops like the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 are only good for some light web browsing (which has led to the popularity of the term “netbook”), the truth is that these little machines can come in handy in a variety of situations. As a freelance radio journalist, I’ve used several different netbooks to edit audio interviews and upload sound to an FTP server on the road.