Wide-screen sucks for heavy terminal users
I've always been complaining loudly about wide-screen displays. 4:3 is much better for those of us who mainly work with xterms of 80 characters width (due to e.g. kernel coding style and e-mail conventions). The additional width is typically not enough for having three terminal windows next to each other, but the lacking height means way less visible lines of code.
This is why I'm still using my Panasonic CF-R5 (10.2" 1024x768 sub-notebook) from 2006. Despite it almost falling apart on all sides after three years of most intensive daily use, despite it feeling slower than any Atom based netbook that I've used.
So despite having tried an ideapad S9e, a HP mininote 2133, I can only deem them unusable for any serious without an external display.
Right now I'm desperately looking for a device that can be the successor for the CF-R5. I don't need much computing power, a Atom N270 would be the minimum but would work. I am happy with narrow keyboards as I'm using one for 3 years every day. I don't need tons of memory as I'm not using any bloated graphical desktop (just ion+uxterm). All I care about is Intel integrated graphics, a small device, ideally 10", with at least 768 pixels height.
It seems there are now 1366x768 based 10" netbooks, but all you can find is nVidia based Samsung devices, which are obviously completely unsuitable for, considering nVidia treats the FOSS community like crap.
I've spent half the day in Seoul's Yeoksam Electronics Market. The only thing that would remotely resemble my requirements is the ASUS eeePC 1101HA. But it's 11.6" wide screen, which makes the device considerably wider/larger than the CF-R5. Plus, the maximum memory configuration is 2G.
The other options is to buy a CF-R8. Still 4:3 ratio, almost the same size as the CF-R5. If only Panasonic was selling them outside the US. Yes, I know you can mail order them. But I'd love to have a look and try it before spending at least 1500 EUR on it.
So the Notebook industry still fails to impress me. Noisy (with fan) devices with ever wider screens. Apparently ignoring the fact that there are people who can imagine more interesting things to do with their computer than to play movies.