The hottest trend in laptops this year is the introduction of the Netbook to the mass market. This sleek mini-laptop category is perfect for road warriors, college students, and anyone else looking for max portability to satisfy their mobile computing needs. Of course, some will counter that a Netbook is inferior to traditional bulky laptops offered in previous years, but the point is subjective. As central processors continue to get faster and chips shrink in size, portability doesn’t come at quite the cost it would have in the recent past.

The battery life of an Acer Netbook averages around 5 to 6 hours, an incredible advancement compared to a full-sized laptop battery purchased just a few years prior. The 10.1 inch screen, while sometimes a bit cramped for some websites, works just fine. And the built-in webcam is fun to play around with and quite practical for communicating with people from distant locations.

The basic Netbook comes without an internal optical drive (CD, DVD, or Blue-Ray reader/burners) which helps reduce both the size and expense of the device. There are, however, some bundle deals where retailers and manufacturers are starting to offer external drives to improve the deal. For the casual computer user, these external drives are the perfect solution as they allow for specific functionality on an as needed basis. For the more advanced user, programs can be installed and files transferred with the use of pen drives, making the lack of an optical drive nearly a mute point. A product ranking site is a good place to start research on the best Netbook for your needs.

Obviously, Netbooks cater to a specific sector of the laptop market, and excel in portability while lacking in other areas such as gaming or high-end graphics rendering. For these tasks, a traditional laptop with all of the bells and whistles should be considered. While more expensive and less portable than Netbooks, these higher end laptops will include more processing power, larger screens, better graphics cards, and optical drives such as CD and DVD players/burners. The top-of-market laptops will also include Blu-Ray players and HDV output.

Altogether, this has been a great year for laptops. With the retail market suffering, laptop manufacturers were forced to provide lower priced machines to open the market to those unwilling to shell out the cash for the latest and greatest in portable computing, while stuffing more attractive features into the standard market to convince the gamers and high-end enthusiasts to buy new machines. The end result is that the market is right and the options are manifold.